An insightful work about the mental obstacles that can stand between people and the lives they wish to lead.
A young woman struggles to overcome her fraught relationship with food in Kinn’s debut novel.
Apples, carrots, bread, chicken, cereal, granola bars, milk, peanut butter, potatoes, and rice: These are the only 10 foods that Zillah Scriven will eat. Her extreme pickiness is one of several attributes that make the 23-year-old Zillah feel like a child. She’s also only five feet tall and still lives at home with her mother, Paula, whose obsession with safety causes her to indulge her daughter’s dietary restrictions, much to the chagrin of nutritionists and Zillah’s absent father. Zillah is slowly working her way through college—her fear of using public bathrooms limits how many classes she can take per day—but she’s hoping to land an internship and move in with her boyfriend, Cliff. One day, while sitting in her bedroom, Zillah hears a sentiment, spoken in the next apartment, that closely matches her own: “My life revolves around fear and the fear keeps me stuck here at home.…I want my adult life to begin.” She realizes that she’s listening to a neighbor’s conversation with her therapist. Zillah begins to regularly eavesdrop on these therapy sessions, soon learning that the stranger is an agoraphobe who hasn’t left her apartment in months. Zillah begins to recognize that she shares several anxious tendencies with this woman and even wonders aloud about seeing a therapist herself, although Paula quickly shuts down the idea: It’s “called ‘being an adult,’ and you don’t need to pay some therapist to do it for you.” When Zillah unexpectedly befriends her mysterious neighbor—a woman named Lise—she begins to explore the reasons for her own diet and how they’ve been keeping her from living the life she wants.
Kinn brings Zillah to life with an idiosyncratic narrative voice, capturing the revulsion and neuroses that dominate her life. Here, for instance, Zillah describes the horror of eating a strawberry: “I imagine the slippery spatter and viscera in my mouth. Invading my throat. Choking me. Leaving a taste I won’t be able to get rid of…My stomach tightens like I’ve drunk from a cup of dirty paintbrush water. It flows through me, turning me to brackish yuck.” Kinn is a clinical psychologist and takes pains to accurately portray the condition known as ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder) as well as the treatment strategy ERP (exposure and response prevention therapy), which uses lighthearted activities and games to help patients confront their problems. The novel often feels like an enactment of such therapy, placing readers convincingly in the position of Zillah in order to move them toward a state of understanding and catharsis. The book explores the protagonist’s realization that her intense pickiness isn’t pickiness at all, but a peculiar regimen forced upon her—the result of a family history that she knows nothing about. Although the book lacks some of the sharpness that one might expect in a literary novel, the reading experience is nonetheless transformative.
An insightful work about the mental obstacles that can stand between people and the lives they wish to lead.Pub Date: July 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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