A heartfelt, if conventional, story of guilt, love, and going home again.
In Nelson’s novel, a young woman undergoes an emotional reckoning at Feather River Ranch in Northern California.
The story unfolds across dual timelines, alternating between 12-year-old Brooke’s final summer at a horse camp in 1993 and her reluctant return to the ranch a decade later. As a tween, Brooke is more at ease on a horse than she is in social circles, but she still forms an intense bond with fellow camper Tommy, who’s a year older than she is. Brooke makes an impulsive and ultimately reckless decision that leads to tragedy. Brooke suffers a concussion, the camp permanently closes, and the terrible event that occurred calcifies into memory, although Brooke carries her feeling of guilt into adulthood. In 2003, she returns to town to help her injured grandfather, Charlie, and confronts not only the ranch’s physical decay, but also her emotions about the fateful summer that changed her life. Her former sleepwalking habit returns, and she’s forced into daily confrontations with the past as she tackles ranch repairs and horse training. Her mother’s long-buried secrets are revealed, and Jake—once a teenage crush, now the local veterinarian—reenters her life. These threads weave together as Brooke reshapes her understanding of the past and of herself. Nelson viscerally renders the novel’s atmosphere with storm-split skies (“The wind whipped through the pine trees, shaking their needles to the ground”), splintered wood, and the muscular volatility of horses, while grounding the emotional drama in lived detail. The interwoven timelines maintain a sense of tension, but the author handles Brooke’s inner struggles with restraint. Still, the broader narrative arc—returning to the ranch, rekindling a first love, reconciling with family—adheres closely to familiar Hallmark-style beats, and Jake functions more as emotional ballast than as a fully realized character, limiting the romantic subplot’s depth.
A heartfelt, if conventional, story of guilt, love, and going home again.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798897400188
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 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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