Modern gothic meets psychological suspense in this wholly original work.
Revisiting the ghosts of the past becomes literal for a young woman returning to her hometown.
Although it has the outlines of a Hallmark movie—big-city gal in a small town finds love with a childhood friend—this novel is far grittier and more surprising than that basic storyline implies. Opening with ghastly images from Cassie’s mind—people slaughtered, blood gushing, all at her own hand—we find that Cassie’s OCD generates obtrusive, violent thoughts. Smiling on the outside, Cassie has built a life in New York as a literary agent’s assistant and a happy relationship with girlfriend Lavender. After some misunderstandings, she torpedoes it all and retreats to her childhood home in rural New Jersey. She soon reconnects with Eli, her closest high school confidant, who is now often drunk, mourning the accidental death of his wife, Beth, and dealing with the pressures of raising their two young children. He does have Joan next door to help with the kids, but for him, meeting Cassie again reorders his life, and the two are soon married. Intervening chapters, growing in depth, are narrated by Beth, a disembodied spirit who exists in the woods behind her old house. Her contributions are sometimes ephemeral, sometimes a narration of her traditional, religious past. And then one day, as a kind of gift to Cassie, who’s wandering in the woods, Beth manifests as a shower of blooms. She didn’t anticipate the weirdness of Cassie, who eats one of the flowers and ingests Beth. The ghost of a dead wife haunting the second is a familiar gothic flourish, but here the two develop a touching, almost romantic, relationship. However, when Beth begins to remember her death, everything Cassie believes may turn out to be a fraud.
Modern gothic meets psychological suspense in this wholly original work.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781668074596
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
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
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