Superb. Like a blue-collar Franzen novel.
A successful Southeast retail chain contends with two different destabilizing forces.
The novel begins during the 1979 holiday season at the Lexington, Kentucky, branch of discount retailer Baker-Taylor’s, where Fran Taylor—as a female chief executive, she’s a rarity—ruminates over her good fortune: “Poor, to middling, to downright upper-middle class, judging by their ’78 tax returns, and all within twenty years.” Sharing the glory as well as the CEO title is Fran’s husband, Fred, who, after all this time—they’ve known each other since they were teenagers—still isn’t “at the point where he could see the red of her hair from across the room without feeling a shiver within.” Fran isn’t looking to further complicate her life—in addition to running the business, she and Fred are raising four kids—when she finds herself attracted to Wendy Patterson, one of the stores’ assistant managers. It isn't lost on Fran that if she acts on her desire, she could lose everything. The novel spans a decade in the lives of the six Taylors, each of whom is hard-bitten and bruised in some combination, and each of whom takes a turn with the book’s point of view. Whitaker has written a sprawling, extravagantly intelligent novel about people quietly breaking free from constraints—marital, gender, class. Here, as in her widely admired debut novel, The Animators (2017), she's attuned to working people’s lives and to the idea that professional ambition may be the purest reflection of character. The novel plays out against a distinctly American landscape in which Wendy’s encroachment on the Taylor marriage syncs up with the encroachment of a Walmart-like chain that people on the Baker-Taylor’s team refer to as “the Beast.” Not for nothing is this book’s epigraph a Sam Walton quote.
Superb. Like a blue-collar Franzen novel.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780593733349
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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