Both family reunion and ghost story, even though neither quite comes to life.
Four previously unknown half siblings set out on a road trip in search of their long-absent father.
Madeline Hill finds her life exhausting, but mostly plentiful, having built her family’s little organic farm in Tennessee into a destination for foodies and families alike. But the chip on her shoulder comes rushing back when her half brother Reuben shows up in a PT Cruiser with a trunkful of family secrets about her deadbeat dad, Chuck Hill. Not the least of these is the fact that their father created and abandoned families four times in total, leaving behind kids who each followed in their father’s largely invented footsteps. Despite her reservations, Mad joins her brother—a sensitive, middle-aged crime writer who followed the path set by his dad, known as Charles Hill—on his ill-advised quest. In Oklahoma, they pick up their father’s other spitfire daughter, Pep, a championship basketball player raised by coach Chip Hill to never give up. Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, they pick up Theron, called Tom, the 11-year-old son of a famous TV broadcaster mother, fathered by cameraman Carl Hill. Wilson’s quartet makes for an amiable if fairly milquetoast bunch, but their awkward bonding leans toward cringe rather than comfort. They finally do find their absentee father out West, but it’s more realization than revelation, mostly about the frailty of man and what it means to be a family. Wilson is positively masterful at quirky family dramas and many of the ingredients that have made his stories so popular are present here: an eclectic cast, a dash of absurdity, and complicated but very real family dynamics. Somewhere in his latest, though, some spice got missed and readers end up on a road to nowhere. “We’ve had our big family fight and now we’ve made up,” Pep says on the road. “That’s how it works, I think.”
Both family reunion and ghost story, even though neither quite comes to life.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780063317512
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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