Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.
A bildungsroman of middle age about a 47-year-old goat farmer; her aging, beloved husband; and her high school best friend turned lover, set amid the lush fields of western Massachusetts.
Lucy Richard (that’s “Ree-SHARD,” from her French Canadian forebears) calls Edin, Massachusetts, home again after more than two decades in happy exile while her husband, Michael Mancini, taught at Columbia and she worked in the university’s communications office. Their return to Edin goes as badly as Adam and Eve’s: Michael begins to exhibit signs of dementia and Lucy learns that running her father’s farm requires reserves no one person has. As a year passes, joys and troubles ebb and flow like the nearby Connecticut River: The goats freshen and kid, Michael requires more care, Lucy’s friend Alexandra “Sandy” Stevens moves to the area to sell solar-power packages, and they tumble into the passionate love they’d shied away from as teenagers. Since Acker edits a literary magazine, The Common, celebrating the importance of place, it’s fitting that her novel derives so much heft from descriptions of everything from asparagus beds to frozen winter soil to the annual joy of new baby goats. Astute readers may guess how Lucy moves forward, but that matters very little. This is a novel about the journey; Lucy and her chosen family face relationships ending, corporate takeovers, homophobia, debilitating illness, elder abuse, and financial precarity while pitching in to repair fences, rescue sick animals, give each other business ideas, and occasionally relax for a few hours of laughter and good, locally sourced food. Amid all this activity is a tale about where the truest love and loyalty lies for a woman in her late 40s. At one point, frustrated by many things, Lucy tries to start a fire. “I have better wood downstairs,” she thinks, “but I’m terribly, defiantly determined to succeed with what I have, wood I never should have brought upstairs in the first place.” It’s the perfect metaphor to illustrate both Lucy herself and the pioneer spirit of the Pioneer Valley.
Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781953002716
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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