This family drama is steeped in suspense, but its likable cast of characters is its main draw.
A family deals with grief after losing one of its members, but questions arise: Who did it, and why?
The Mackie clan is no stranger to loss. After the accidental, tragic death of their young son Griff, Summer and Matt try to move on for the sake of their living children, preteen Willa and 7-year-old Gabe. The family plans a relaxing trip to Zoar Valley Gorge near their hometown of Buffalo, New York. But when Matt, Willa, and Summer fall from a cliff, resulting in Summer’s death, it only leads to another terrible round of grieving. Summer’s sister, Starla, rushes in to help the family. The sheriff’s office suspects foul play. Witnesses noted a stranger yelling at the family before the fall, and young Gabe remembers hearing a clicking noise and seeing a man run past him. Deputy Sheriff Conner Boyle makes it his mission to find out the truth. Summer’s first marriage and her work as a sexual-assault forensics examiner lead to a number of possible suspects, including pedophile Victor Kurtz, who’s been stalking Willa. Victor begins a game of cat and mouse with the police, while the Mackie family takes a much-needed journey to Texas, where Matt’s parents live. There, the Mackies attempt to start over—but Victor keeps outwitting the authorities. Over the course of this book, Neathery immerses the reader in her world with lush metaphors and vivid descriptions of both the New York and Texas settings. The author ably helps the reader navigate the complexity of his characters’ interactions; there are fraught relationships, relationships rekindled, and new relationships formed. She’s particularly deft at capturing the conflicting, layered emotions of grief and heartache while simultaneously weaving a fast-paced mystery into this narrative fabric. At times, the language feels a bit heavy-handed (“Just after midnight, when the air was thick and cloaked in a murky brume…”), but readers will always find themselves rooting for the Mackie family members as they seek happiness.
This family drama is steeped in suspense, but its likable cast of characters is its main draw.Pub Date: July 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73739-202-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Imagery Lit
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2021
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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