A reality TV novel stripped of fluff and fantasy.
Who has what it takes to be a media sensation wife?
Twenty-four-year-old Emily Boylan has never seen The One, a ringer for The Bachelor, but she has just been fired from her dead-end job when a recruiter spots her on the street. In no time, she's entering the bizarro world of reality TV, stepping out of a limousine—one of a long line of limos filled with women—and meeting Dylan Walter, the show's potential love interest. Emily’s star quickly rises thanks to her producer, Miranda, who believes she will clinch the end-of-show proposal and works hard to make it so. And Emily befriends a group of contestants who keep her (relatively) sane and up to speed, developing a particular fondness for savvy Sam with the secret, tragic backstory. The women have no say in how their days go, so they have a dreamlike quality: There's extreme boredom, a helicopter ride, rule changes, and having to repeat themselves for the camera (they get unnervingly good at rephrasing their feelings in reality TV patois). Emily is a pliant good girl who goes along with everything yet cannot justify to herself why, try as she might. Does she want to marry Dylan, or is she just supposed to? A moment when the bubble breaks and the show learns of an unrelated mass shooting by an incel doesn’t do quite enough for the themes or plot to justify its inclusion. However, debut novelist Argy is fantastic at showcasing the subtle power dynamics among Dylan, the women, and the producers in all iterations. Alternating chapters from Miranda’s shrewd perspective illuminate the extent of her control, which is extreme but not complete. She cannot, for instance, prevent the growing bond between Emily and Sam that threatens her narrative.
A reality TV novel stripped of fluff and fantasy.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780593542781
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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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