A workplace novel crossed with a soap opera, offering plenty of food for thought. (Organic and locally sourced, of course.)
Nothing and no one is very cooperative—especially the weather—in this novel about life in a Texas grocery co-op.
Wernersbach’s debut spends one very fraught week among the workers at the fictional Guadalupe Street Co-op in Austin. The novel opens on a Saturday in hurricane season, following store manager Roz, a queer woman who's deeply invested in her work. “For most of the staff, this was just a job. But do the simple math and jobs were most of the hours of a life. Roz had made a decision a long time ago, when she had no money and was putting on the red H-E-B staff shirt for the first time, that she could resent every second of her time on the clock, and her parents for cutting off her credit card, or she could claim a stake in the minutes of her own life by caring about what she did. The work was meaningful if you gave it meaning.” Shortly after Roz watches her ex-wife, a TV weather reporter, deliver the news of imminent gale-force disaster, noticing a huge new engagement ring on her finger, all hell breaks loose. The power goes out, customers panic, one of the cashiers is injured while forcing open the automatic doors…and we’re off. The unhappy, underpaid employees have already filed a petition to unionize, and Roz’s handling of this crisis will provide fuel for their fire. There are two other point-of-view characters: Randy, the 50-year-old nonbinary dairy manager, and Eleanor, the 69-year-old chief executive, who founded the store with a wealthy girlfriend 40 years earlier. Everybody’s hiding something: Randy’s messing around with Molly, Roz’s live-in partner, also an employee; Molly hasn’t told Roz about the petition; Eleanor’s keeping mum about her cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, there’s more stormy weather ahead. Wernersbach’s depiction of their large, diverse, economically struggling cast of characters gives even the minor players their full humanity and their evocation of the Austin setting sparkles with verisimilitude, right down to the very affordable pitcher of Lone Star at the Spider House Café.
A workplace novel crossed with a soap opera, offering plenty of food for thought. (Organic and locally sourced, of course.)Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781685970536
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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