This easy read combines a literary rom-com with an acute portrait of midlife among millennials.
A beginning author gets in over her head, personally and professionally.
Knopf editor Jackson’s sophomore novel—after the bestselling Pineapple Street (2023)—begins with a high-flying, multiphase meet-cute. Caroline Lash, 28, is traveling to the fictional town of Greenhead, Massachusetts, where she’s been awarded an 18-month-long writer’s residency in a beach cottage, hopefully recognizing her own merits and not just the fact that she’s the daughter of Gwendolyn Lash, one of the country’s top-selling authors. Making her way to her seat on the train, she steps on a jelly doughnut, which squirts red goo straight into her crotch. Offered a napkin by a cute guy with "the vibe of someone who knew his way around a kayak," she’s embarrassed that he disappears before she can clarify the non-menstrual origins of her sanguine blotch. When she runs into him a few weeks later at the bank and has a chance to explain, she feels she’s only made things worse, until she goes out and finds a jelly doughnut on the roof of her car. Then he turns up again in her group on a historic home tour. After some flirty banter, they take matters into their own hands. Soon Caroline is quite madly in love with Van Whittaker, who comes with a close-knit lifelong friend group, a set of 30-somethings with small children. Not long after they move in together, Van’s on-again, off-again girlfriend from this group turns up pregnant, the result of a pre-Caroline encounter. She wants to keep the baby, and Van is welcome to be involved or not. Jackson rotates the point of view around the set of friends, deftly depicting the practices and pressures of modern parents, where some have schedules to decide who can take shrooms and who must remain sober enough to drive, where some have fraying connections, money troubles, and/or long kept secrets, where the best advice may come from the gay teenage babysitter. Updike fans will scent an update of that writer’s fraught suburban scandals even before the author’s note acknowledging the inspiration.
This easy read combines a literary rom-com with an acute portrait of midlife among millennials.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798217059959
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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