An emotionally complex mystery that hums with passion.
Piñol Serra’s novel, set in 1997, offers a tale of grief and secrecy in a California family.
When Sara and Nico (a lawyer and an aspiring musician, respectively) return to their small Southern California hometown of Santa Magdalena for the funeral of their mother, Raquel, they unearth a host of secrets about their town and their extended family. Before long, the twin Guatemalan American siblings begin to suspect that their mother’s suicide may have been murder, but Sara quickly becomes distracted by a tense, erotic relationship with Zoe, a local photographer, and several of her artist friends. These attractions begin to tempt her away from her controlled life as a law partner in New York and toward a much sweeter but far more turbulent world of desire. But things become more complicated when she sees a photograph that reveals that someone close to her is having a torrid affair. Meanwhile, Nico’s traumatic past comes to light as he becomes entangled in the schemes of Christian, an independent journalist looking into the darker aspects of his small town. Piñol Serra’s novel presents readers with a vivid exploration of sexuality, race, and class in California, woven into a complex family mystery. The Santa Magdalena community simmers with discontent; the wealthy live side by side with the impoverished, and neither group trusts the other. Although the novel is notably dark in tone and has all the tension of a good thriller, the greatest strength of Piñol Serra’s work lies in his exploration of the interiority of his characters. His portrayal of loss, in particular, is impressively nuanced: “Her expression was unreadable, carved into something cooler and quieter than grief—but it was grief, still. Just in a language only she understood.” Overall, it’s a novel that weaves together a diverse tapestry of emotions, including threads of anger and eroticism, and it’s one that readers will find hard to put down.
An emotionally complex mystery that hums with passion.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798901741252
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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