An engrossing tale as brooding, unpredictable, and invigorating as the sea and storms affecting the characters’ lives.
A trilogy about a youth’s search for belonging finds its completion in a moody, lyrical, deeply life-affirming final installment.
In his Trilogy About the Boy, Stefánsson follows an unnamed teenage orphan—poetically gifted and deeply sensitive—through trauma and loss, toward a fragile sense of safety and belonging. In the earlier volumes, Heaven and Hell (2025) and The Sorrow of Angels (2025), the boy witnesses his best friend’s death in a fishing accident and nearly dies while accompanying a postman across Iceland’s harsh west fjords. The last we saw them, they were tumbling down a snowy mountain with a coffin in tow. In this final installment, they survive—just barely—and recover under the care of locals before returning to the Village, a remote Icelandic port town where passions and prejudices collide in a landscape “scorched by volcanic fire and blasted by wind but with green valleys like dreams…” The book starts slowly, meandering through the pair’s recovery but gaining momentum in its second half. Still mourning, the boy begins to thaw, like the land around him, drawn to a fiery redheaded woman who helps nurse him and, back home, to Ragnheiður, daughter of the petty merchant Friðrik, who feels contempt for the boy’s lower social status even as she’s drawn to him. Torn between grief and desire, he realizes his heart is “divided into two compartments, one called happiness, the other despair.” Stefánsson excels at capturing the rhythms of village life—the gossip, grief, and constant threat of sea and storm—while offering moody reflections on life and death in a place shaped by the forces of nature. What’s also forceful is the power of language. Words surround the poetry-struck boy like fog creeping in from the sea. “Words are not lifeless rock or gnawed, wind-whitened bones up in the mountains,” writes Stefánsson. They “can grow distant over time and be transformed into museums that house the past, what is gone and will never return”—something not just true of the books the boy reads, but of this one, too.
An engrossing tale as brooding, unpredictable, and invigorating as the sea and storms affecting the characters’ lives.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781771967143
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Biblioasis
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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