A smart, twist-filled tale of a woman coping with the loss of her father.
Doll’s novel focuses on a woman dealing with grief and love.
As the book opens, a young woman named Alice O’Brien, in the nervous run-up to her marriage to her fiancé, Oliver Marvette, enters a bridal contest to win a free wedding dress. Her essay will be a tragic one: It will feature not only a biographical sketch of her father, Danny, but also reflections on his tragic death in a plane crash eight years ago. Alice’s dad had long been her hero, the main person who championed her during childhood, when she was diagnosed with selective mutism because she wasn’t able to speak. They developed a private language of signals and gestures. Alice began a private message correspondence with him called “Ask Dad,” which allows Doll to add long stretches of Danny’s own words to the story as he dispenses wisdom about his daughter’s various life dilemmas. Into the melancholy chaos of Alice preparing for her wedding and writing her essay comes a new, totally unexpected element: Her father’s laptop has miraculously survived the plane crash without a scratch. Now, after her mother has been secretly holding on to it for nearly a decade, Alice finally has it. Thanks to her father’s love of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she’s certain she can unlock the laptop and read all his last thoughts and recorded experiences, which adds a further narrative thread to the novel. Through these various story threads, the author fleshes out Alice’s memories of being taken from her parents for a year because of her mutism—“I’ll never get that time back, and those people who caused this to happen, I hope they rot in hell for all eternity”—and bonding with her best friend, Drew. The plot becomes further complicated when Tonya Meyer, a survivor of the plane crash, enters the story.
At heart, Doll’s tale is about characters who are desperate to mend things that have become damaged or gone off-track. Alice’s mother describes Danny as someone who liked to fix things, even when they couldn’t be repaired. “And when he failed,” she recalls, “rather than admit the truth, I think it was just easier for him to take the blame.” This mania applies to plenty of the characters in this tale, which is skillfully complicated by the many narrative voices the author juggles throughout. A lot of these players are badly disjointed in some way, as when Tonya refers to herself as “misaligned, as if she had been living someone else’s life.” This misalignment device becomes crucial in the novel’s second half, when Doll takes his story of fond memories and bereavement and wonderfully shakes it to pieces, upending every one of the audience’s assumptions. These bombshells come in a marvelously controlled series of disclosures that are canny mirror images of the revelations in the book’s first half, retroactively turning the entire novel into a Chinese puzzle and a psychological labyrinth. Amazingly, through it all, Alice’s affection for her lost father remains heartfelt. “There you are, just as I remember you,” she says gently to his image when she first opens his laptop.
A smart, twist-filled tale of a woman coping with the loss of her father.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798275624243
Page Count: 329
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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