Like panning for gold; there are moments that gleam with brilliance.
A mother and daughter rekindle their relationship as they search for buried treasure.
Bea Macon makes a living foreseeing disasters. Her job as a commodities analyst in New York demands that she predict and profit from floods, hurricanes, and droughts, all of whose seemingly imaginary consequences occur far from the desk she rarely leaves. When Bea prophesies a storm that never arrives, she’s visited instead by a slew of personal disasters: HR, the feds, termination, blacklisting. Alone and unemployed, Bea buys a one-way ticket to her last resort—her mother. Although Bea approved the house in Salt Lake City and pays its rent, it’s her first visit, and the first time the two have lived together since Bea was 13 years old. Bea and her mother, Christy, stiffly get in and out of each other’s way in the manner of those lacking true intimacy. Both women tread society’s surfaces, bereft of any substantive ties to anchor them, including with one another. Living in proximity seems only to reveal that they are strangers. Christy is a character, not a caretaker. When Bea was 13, Christy followed her husband to Canada in pursuit of divorce papers, only to end up living with him, his new girlfriend, and their son for the following years while Bea traversed middle and high school without her. Bea finds her mother’s resourcefulness embarrassing, her optimism foolish. Chief among Christy’s totems of naïve optimism is her map: She’s an avid member of an online forum called the Conversation, whose devotees plumb the wilderness in search of an alleged treasure hidden by a recluse dubbed the Poet. When the mother-daughter duo is evicted, Bea decides to tag along on Christy’s trip to a town called Mercy and accompany (and heckle) her mother on the next leg of her journey. Bea and Christy’s adventure is marked by shady characters, dizzying desert heat, and the kind of disasters Bea can neither predict nor prevent. This depiction of a mother-daughter relationship is agonizingly apt, proof that mothers can, at times, bring out the best in their children; they do bring out the worst. A slow-to-start book eventually results in rich, vivid characters. Gasps of gorgeous prose are weighed down by occasionally plodding plot points.
Like panning for gold; there are moments that gleam with brilliance.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834480
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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