A dark, dramatic, and thoughtful reflection on the traumatic aspects of love and family.
Family secrets, forbidden love, and past hurts collide spectacularly in the rainy streets of Paris in Bradley-Silverio Donato’s novel.
Inside a faux-chic Paris hotel room, Lynne and her wife, Susan, prepare to board a plane to South Africa the next day. First, though, they tersely await the arrival of Lynne’s son, Nick; Lynne’s old colleague, Marc; and Susan’s eccentric artistic friend, Laslo, for a send-off. A heavy and haunting specter hangs over the seemingly sweet and innocuous get-together: Lynne’s ex-husband—Nick’s father—died earlier that day, leaving his forgotten family reeling, torn between grief and relief. What was meant to be a reunion “of people, of ideas, of things left unspoken” becomes a confrontation with the quiet weight of childhood abuse, sexual confusion, and incomprehensible truths long buried. Lynne, who struggled with her sexuality for so long, and Nick, who never came to terms with what happened to him when he was a child, speak in “layers of filtered truth, each story wrapped in someone else’s until reality blurred like coffee grounds in water.” Over the course of one transformative night, the gathered five reckon with love: depraved, lost, unshakeable, fierce love. Bradley-Silverio Donato weaves this heartbreaking yarn with prose that is as complex as it is poetic. The setting is evocatively dreary, with just a glimmer of hope, in the rainy Parisian streets at dusk and the rising sun in the dawn. The novel is satisfyingly concise; the author says exactly what needs to be said, and leaves alone what does not need to be articulated (just glimpsed in the dark secrecy of night) in a lyrical narrative that will keep readers engaged no matter what they may find on the next page. Like their own painful histories, Lynne and Nick’s story will stay with readers long after the final pages.
A dark, dramatic, and thoughtful reflection on the traumatic aspects of love and family.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781969935206
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 28, 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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