A beautifully written reimagined folktale.
A young trans girl traverses the sky, sea, and the edge of death to save her sisters.
“What must be understood about tales like this one is that hardly any story has a true beginning”: So begins Tierney’s debut novel. In a village stuck between the intruding ocean, sky, and forest, four sisters find themselves in the middle of a queer retelling of a Portuguese folktale. Elixane, the youngest and the daughter of luck and fortune, only remembers her older sisters in “faded scraps of memory.” Years earlier, they were stolen by their future husbands: Adelina, child of the night and sea, married the king of the ocean; Borboleta, child of the day and sky, married the king of the air; and Dores, child of the wind and rain, married the king of Misery. Their lives and marriages are a blend of beauty and horror, joy and fear, fulfillment and longing. When a plea for help reaches her from Dores, Elixane sets off on a hero’s journey full of adventure, danger, and anthropomorphic animals. With a little help from her previously unknown lifelong companions—Marquês Boaventura, known as Luck, the clever and foolish lord of good luck, and his mischievous and gorgeous sister, Marquesa Másorte, or Jinx, the marquesa of misfortune—Elixane tries to break magical curses, stop an unending war, and save her sister from the king beyond death. Tierney renders Elixane’s transness and queerness in beautifully understated ways. Describing how Elixane was at first mistakenly believed to be a boy, the narrator says, “These things happen, and are remedied easily enough once the child can put a voice to the truth.” And Elixane lives her truth unapologetically, if a little nervously, especially around Jinx. If the repetitive nature of the narrative device leaves little space for suspense, Tierney’s poetic prose consistently elevates the tale. The novel particularly shines when exploring sisterhood, grief, trauma, and the process of stepping confidently into one’s power.
A beautifully written reimagined folktale.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781250421791
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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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