In elegant prose, this deceptively quiet novel juggles big spiritual ideas with big social issues.
A young woman’s religious obsession affects those around her and highlights a tumultuous moment of great change for common people.
From childhood, Aleys, a woolmaker’s daughter in medieval Brugge, Belgium, seeks the divine, like her mother, who inherited a beautiful illuminated psalter. Although the saints’ stories were written in Latin, Aleys’ mother told them from memory in Dutch, giving her daughter dreams of hair shirts and pilgrimages. After the mother’s death in childbirth, Aleys joins the Franciscan friars at the behest of one Friar Lukas. He tasks her to live with an order of beguines—secular women dedicated to good works—and recruit some to become Franciscan nuns. However, she finds that the beguines have their own purposes, including a clandestine reading circle, leaving them with little desire for ecstatic spirituality. Aleys’ visions are well described but not parsed in modern terms like neurodiversity or mental illness. She heals a few sick and dying people but cannot save the beguines’ magistra, Sophia, from death. Katrijn, Sophia’s deputy—and, perhaps lover—casts Aleys out of the community. Lukas’s older brother Jaan, the bishop of Tournai, uses Aleys as a prop to convince townspeople of the church’s power. Confused by her unpredictable gifts, Aleys accepts Jaan’s offer to make her an anchorite. She’ll live in a sealed room attached to the church and never leave, gaining status as a holy woman. Even in strict confinement, Aleys has erotic visions of union with Jesus and Mary that echo the title’s reference to the Old Testament Song of Songs. Meanwhile, she teaches Marte, the beguine assigned to bring her meals, how to read and write, resulting in a showdown with an inquisitorial papal delegation. The ending might seem foregone, but author Rich Edwards has a twist or two in store, plus some stark examples of clerical corruption that are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 13th.
In elegant prose, this deceptively quiet novel juggles big spiritual ideas with big social issues.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781966302056
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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