A romance with sweet, spicy, and sumptuous on the menu in the kitchen and the bedroom.
A love-averse New Yorker and a New Age mineral shop manager rediscover their passions in Vermont in this novel.
Phoebe Stevens needs to get out of New York City. A very public breakup at a new, high-end steakhouse not only cost Phoebe her longtime job as a menu planner for a Manhattan restaurant, but a picture of her Negroni-fueled exit carrying a tomahawk steak has gone viral online as well. A friend provides her a reprieve from Big Apple infamy: a job setting up a gastropub in Vermont, part of a craft brewery called the Speakeasy. Her new home comes with a handsome caretaker named Sam, a tarot card–reading, New Age type who was raised by his Grandma Rose and Aunt Iris, two witches. He runs Crystal Persuasion, their mineral shop. As Sam shows Phoebe around the small town and she uses local flavors to craft the Speakeasy’s new menu, both suddenly find their appetites whetted for each other. They are reticent to open up completely, as Sam believes his one shot at love has already passed him by. Phoebe, meanwhile, as always believes passion to be an impediment to practicality and success. But just as the two finally loosen up—with a little help from Grandma Rose and Aunt Iris—Phoebe is offered her dream job, complete with a return to Manhattan and a chance to ruin her ex-boyfriend Drew. Stivali’s romance doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it is still full of delicious food and steamy, consent-positive sex scenes for readers to gorge themselves on. Phoebe and Sam may be genre-appropriate attractive, but they’re still remarkably relatable, hung up on their pasts and constantly undercut by their own overthinking. The story never takes itself too seriously, with cat puns and hand-job jokes just a sample of its humor and Aunt Iris and Grandma Rose delivering as much blush-inducing comic relief as guidance. Sam, having been raised by these two, is a male protagonist who is more in touch with his feminine side, a refreshing change from some tendencies in modern love stories.
A romance with sweet, spicy, and sumptuous on the menu in the kitchen and the bedroom.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Heart Eyes Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
