A powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity.
In this stream-of-consciousness wilderness saga set in the 1840s, on the eve of the California Gold Rush, a reclusive trapper rejected by society fights for survival on a westward trek filled with treacherous encounters.
As a child, Silas Hall is the bane of his Pennsylvania family’s existence. He is prone to tantrums, acts of destruction, and prolonged escapes into the woods—behavior that gets him dosed with laudanum. As a young adult, he fathers a baby with his mother’s nonverbal housekeeper. But overwhelmed by the demands of intimacy, he abandons them, making the wild his permanent home, as he says, "so I might live in a world that could hold me." Heading across muddy and jagged terrain with a mule and a musket, he comes across dead bodies and avoids becoming one of them by committing his own killings. Setting foot on Sierra Nevada soil, where few white men have dared go before, he periodically visits a Nisenan chief, No Rope, whose friendship he has earned by helping in the fight against white antagonists who, in due course, will eradicate entire Native populations in pursuit of gold. Another tribe isn’t so friendly to Silas, wounding and taking him captive and, in a super-tense scene, threatening to deal him the gruesome fate visited upon the men he had hooked up with. Alternating between third-person narration and remorseful letters from Silas to his son, the novel boasts powerful natural images, such as a massive flock of passenger pigeons that blackens the sky at a dark moment in young Silas’ life. An exhaustive and sometimes exhausting book written under the influence of Cormac McCarthy and perhaps James Joyce, Weil’s follow-up to The Age of Perpetual Light (2017) is as much about sounds and smells and distant visions as it is about human action. The great tragedy of Silas’ life remains his father’s cutting-down of the elm tree that once called out to him through his bedroom window.
A powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780385550994
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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