A strange but intermittently involving little novel about the life cycle of a darn good foodstuff.
Davis offers a short novel about one man’s love of biscuits.
As this odd, slim work opens, an unnamed narrator is contemplating the biscuit he’s preparing to eat. He gazes at its appearance, runs over in his imagination its possible delights, anticipates its joys in indulgent detail: “I studied it in the way one might study a photograph of a stranger’s face—not for beauty, but for character,” the narrator thinks. “It had none of the uniformity of factory-born pastries, none of the glossy, symmetrical perfection that exists to lure you at a glance.” Rather, this biscuit is homemade and presumably one of a kind—something to be treasured before it’s consumed. The narrator spends a good number of pages cherishing it until his musings are interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing. It’s probably a telemarketer or some other such nuisance, but does the narrator dare to distract his attention from the biscuit? “If ever a baked good could exude an air of quiet satisfaction, this was it.” After finally eating the biscuit and finding it dry, the narrator contemplates what might have happened if he’d drizzled honey on it as a moisturizer—but that would present dangers of its own if the honey dripped too fast, he thinks. As the narrator moves on to the prospect of baking his own biscuit, he begins talking to himself: “I feared the void,” he says aloud. “But now…here I stand, with something vaguely biscuit-shaped in hand.” As the story progresses in its weird, nearly delusional level of rapt concentration, Davis works hard to invest his readers in the mini-drama of a good biscuit: the anticipation, the consumption, and the baking. He cannily uses dramatic language (“I could see it: that perfect version of myself pulling the tray from the oven”) in order to color a story of “a biscuit worthy of folklore.” As such, the storytelling is unquestionably passionate. Obviously, readers’ results will vary depending on how excited they are by pastry, since the biscuit is, in essence, the entire book.
A strange but intermittently involving little novel about the life cycle of a darn good foodstuff.Pub Date: March 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781971536002
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Wayward Scripts
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 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
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