A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.
Marooned on a desert island, six high school girls must survive the elements and one another in this debut novel by Castle.
In 1993, 17-year-old Ellery Holmes is a talented heptathlete, starting as a scholarship student at Kings’ Academy, a top English private school. She’ll be meeting some of her new classmates (five girls, two boys) for the first time on a school trip to the Maldives. Ellery is something of a loner—a trait that’s exacerbated by the recent death of her father. She makes a new friend in the brainy, bullied Dawkes, but the rest of the rich, spoiled group offer little hope of acceptance. Petty jealousies and spite, Ellery can handle, but then the group’s plane goes down and they wash up on an uninhabited island. The pilot is dead, the group’s teacher is badly injured, and the two boys swim off alone to a neighboring island. Ellery and Dawkes are left trying to cooperate with alpha mean girl Whitney and her fellow “Cronies.” Further complicating matters is the fact that the remaining member of the group, Skye, is Ellery’s former best friend, whom she hasn’t spoken to since they kissed two years ago. Castle writes from Ellery’s first-person point of view and intersperses occasional diary entries by Dawkes throughout the narrative. The prose is crisp and effective, and the dialogue feels naturalistic. Castle’s story explores what humans are capable of when far from civilization, unambiguously following in the footsteps of William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies1954), which it name checks. The main difference is that Castle’s castaways are mostly female. The stage is thus set for an exploration of the teenage group’s strengths (levelheadedness, adaptable intelligence, a willingness to cooperate) and weaknesses (posturing and a toxic adherence to social hierarchies). One can argue that the negative characteristics are attached too tightly to the Cronies, which makes them rather grueling characters; it also lessens the impact of their descent into evil. Nonetheless, the other players’ plights demand resolution and will keep readers on tenterhooks.
A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-916903-13-5
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Dark Horse Publishing LLP
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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