An urban high school novel that puts humanity far ahead of sociology.
The shooting of an unarmed high school student in Chicago tripwires a series of disruptions and revelations involving police corruption and a Black teacher’s uneasy family life.
Buddy Mack is the kind of dedicated English teacher any public school would be lucky to have, especially in Chicago’s volatile South Side, whose Mayfield High enrolls many poor or at-risk students. Three of these kids especially concern Buddy: Zeke, who’s great at football, but not so great at staying out of trouble, whether it’s a pregnant girlfriend or detention; Dontell, whose unruly behavior camouflages a mind enabling him to “just look at a textbook and everything inside would download into his brain”; and Zeke’s cousin Truth, a moody, smooth-talking sophomore with relatives engaged in unsavory criminal activities. Buddy’s own life away from his job is almost as chaotic as his students’. He’s married to an ambitious corporate lawyer eager for upward mobility to the city’s posh North Side, even though Buddy’s not so sure he wants to leave Hyde Park behind. Buddy wrestles with the level of his commitment to his community in fitful discussions with his brother-in-law, Curtis, a corrupt patrolman who subdues his self-loathing with heavy drinking and resentment toward Buddy that borders on envy. The tangled lives of all these adults and teens converge in explosive fashion when Truth is shot by Curtis while carrying out a mysterious errand for one of his crooked relatives. The ramifications of that errand and its outcome have shattering effects on the seemingly disparate worlds of both Buddy and his students. Boyd’s impressive command of his engrossing novel’s multiple points of view is matched by his compassion for his often perplexing but always engaging characters. The novel’s heart and its smarts are almost as big as Buddy Mack’s own.
An urban high school novel that puts humanity far ahead of sociology.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781250348456
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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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