A captivating story of midlife renewal.
An alcoholic fights to reclaim her life while tending to a dying friend and young children in Thorndike’s luminous novel of recovery.
Fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist Ginny Thorndike is leaving rehab after overdosing on booze and pills following a downward spiral of addiction that broke up her marriage and got her medical license revoked. Helping her is her son Rob, who stays at her Sag Harbor, New York, cottage, flushes her stash, and distracts her from cravings. When he returns to his six-member group marriage at an Ohio commune, her other son Jamie and his boyfriend, Miles, fly up from Key West to continue the vigil, but the caretaking dynamic flips when Miles develops Lou Gehrig’s Disease. As the fatal neurodegenerative ailment worsens, Ginny, with nothing better to do, moves to Key West and helps Jamie with Miles: She feeds him, helps him use the toilet, wheels him to the beach, and develops an intense spiritual bond with him as death approaches. Duty calls again when Rob’s group marriage collapses and his wife Natalia gives birth to twins; she abandons the family, prompting Rob to summon Ginny for emergency baby care. The twins run her ragged but also reinvigorate her, and over several years she regains her medical license and starts a thriving relationship with a man. Thorndike makes Ginny a complex, prickly, conflicted heroine, ashamed of her sins, apprehensive about her future, adrift and in search of redemption. Her story provides a vivid study of the psychic fragility of recovery, conveyed in haunting prose that evokes the unappeasable power of alcoholic yearning. (“She’s afraid of how she’ll feel when she’s alone, at dusk, at seven at night, at eight and nine and ten. She wants to say, Don’t leave me.”) The result is a moving testament to the ways in which taking up the burdens of others can lift a heavy weight from the heart.
A captivating story of midlife renewal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798992668216
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Beck & Branch
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
