A lovely, compulsively readable story about finding your path and believing in your own worth.
A cyclist leads a group bike trip from New York City to Niagara Falls…with both her mother and a former one-night stand in tow.
Abby Stern’s biggest passion is her bike. Bicycling saved her when she was an overweight child of divorce, forced into attending weight-loss camp every summer by her judgmental mother. Flash-forward 15 years and she’s in a mostly happy relationship with Mark, a former camper she reconnected with as an adult. He’s half the size he used to be and adores Abby exactly the way she is. She should be over the moon that Mark wants to take their relationship to the next level, even if he won’t eat sugar or learn to ride a bike. He loves her, and that should be enough, right? When Abby gets the chance to lead a 12-day bicycling trip through New York, she takes it—it will be time on her precious bike, but most importantly, it’s time to clear her head, away from Mark. But the trip ends up being more complicated than she expected, mostly due to two unexpected riders. First, there’s Sebastian, a one-night stand Abby met before things got serious with Mark. And then there’s her mother, Eileen, who claims she just wants to spend time with Abby—but after a childhood filled with shame and guilt about her body, Abby is apprehensive. As she and Sebastian spend more time together, Abby is both excited and dismayed to discover herself feeling things she’s never felt with Mark—but can she trust a man who went viral on TikTok for sleeping his way around Brooklyn? Meanwhile, relying on her mother for help makes Abby wonder if their relationship might be salvaged after all. Abby is a deeply likable character, and Weiner expertly handles the delicate balance between her current body neutrality and her deep-seated trauma from years of attempting to shrink her body. The other riders on the trip provide humor and poignancy, and Weiner occasionally dips into their points of view. The romance between Abby and Sebastian is a slow burn that’s incredibly fun to read, but Abby’s journey to make her life her own is the real standout.
A lovely, compulsively readable story about finding your path and believing in your own worth.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781668033425
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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
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