A haunting story of the search for a better life.
Bond’s debut novel subtly tells the stories of several staff members and residents of a group home for troubled teenage boys in 1980s Kentucky.
As the book opens, its primary narrator, AWOL—named for his penchant for escape attempts—is 14, and the story follows him over the next few years. The structure is relatively episodic, with the two main threads being AWOL’s own coming-of-age and the efforts of Watts, an insightful staff member, to improve the lives of his charges. “Watts had prided himself on knowing when there was still a kid on the inside,” AWOL says—but Bond also includes allusions to Watts’ own struggles and flaws. Bond’s close attention to detail, including his use of the word “peer” to describe the home’s residents, gives a precise sense of the language and routines of the place, such as residents being assigned chores in the kitchen and finding stories by Dickens in old issues of Reader’s Digest in the library. AWOL uses the word “peer” from the first page without explaining its context, a device that helps the reader see life through the eyes of these young men. And every once in a while, AWOL makes an observation that breaks your heart: “I’d see teenagers and wonder if I could still be one.” AWOL’s own skill at helping his fellow teens write letters suggests one path forward for him, but his reckoning with what adult life might entail—including the realities of class and public hostility toward “juvenile delinquents”—helps explain his tendency to flee whenever he has the chance. And as the narration makes clear, the realities of the teens’ lives feed their desire for escape: “We ran when our cousins were killed and Watts wouldn’t let us go to the funeral. We ran when peers made fun of our teeth.” This is a slow-burning but moving account of adolescence under duress.
A haunting story of the search for a better life.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798885740685
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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