An excellent debut distinguished by well-drawn characters and desert grit.
Kirwan’s novel follows a young girl in California with a special connection to animals and mysticism.
The opening sequence of the story places readers on a desert ranch in late-1970s Southern California, where Sara, the 16-year-old protagonist, has seemingly breathed her last. Her best friend and first love, 17-year-old Sam, stands at her bedside along with Sara’s father, both of them devastated and trying to figure out what to do about the third presence in the room: Hamisch, a seemingly normal raccoon whom Sara understood to be an alebrije, a sort of spirit guide highly prized in Mexican folklore. Hamisch, who was a close friend of Sara’s, guards her body ferociously, and as Sara’s father moves in to knife the creature, Sara’s body erupts in spectral light, briefly stunning the men and providing an opportunity for Hamisch to flee. Miraculously, Sara’s corpse opens its eyes and begins to breathe shortly after. The narrative then skips all the way back to Sara’s arrival on the ranch as a baby, carried through harsh conditions by her father after crossing the U.S. border from Mexico and the violent death of her mother. “The girl’s purple leggings were at least a size too small for her tiny body,” Kirwan writes. “She wore no shoes. Her white socks were bright and somehow untouched by whatever misfortune had been visited upon the two of them.” As Sara grows up in the shade of avocado trees, she meets and falls in love with Sam, the son of a rich lawyer who spends his summers on the ranch, owned by his uncle. Not long after their first romantic forays, Sara is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, and as she draws closer to death, her ability to connect with worlds and dimensions beyond our own deepens—a connection she suspects comes from her deceased mother and that may be her last shot, in this life, at knowing her.
The vividly realized setting of Kirwan’s debut is rendered beautifully in prose so lucid that the reader can nearly smell the desert air: “The soil in those hills was pure silt, powder fine and the color of cremated human remains. It settled onto and into everything. You could taste it in the back of your throat twenty-four hours a day.” While stories of teenage love and romance are often overwrought, the author manages to keep the narrative from verging into melodrama—often by employing Sara’s incisive wit to great effect, which only serves to underscore her memorable individuality. Sam is similarly well drawn; he’s a young man with real pathos who, in Kirwan’s hands, transcends the cliched rich-kid-who-hates-his-dad trope to become a point of identification for the reader—he doesn’t claim to grasp the otherworldly gifts Sara possesses, but he’s open enough to understand that he’s in the presence of something more powerful and bigger than himself. By the end of the novel, readers will want to follow these two characters anywhere, on this plane or any other.
An excellent debut distinguished by well-drawn characters and desert grit.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781972197004
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Liminal Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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