A compelling and refreshing premise delivers emotionally layered thrills.
In Lute’s novel, a young woman returns to her hometown for work and uncovers secrets about her family.
Atlas Whitaker was a baby when she was left on the porch of a farmhouse in Willow Creek, West Virginia. She never knew her mother and was raised instead by Zola Whitaker and Celia Jones, two compassionate and strong women who took her in as their own. In 1995, Atlas is now a college dropout plagued by aimlessness and an empty checking account; Zola has died, and the elderly Celia is at risk of losing the farmhouse. Guilt-ridden and wanting to help, Atlas takes a job at an asylum-turned-museum, where she assists an uppity curator with an exhibit showcasing Appalachian art. The job posting neglected to mention that Atlas would see ghosts in the hallway or get trapped in the creepy basement. The narrative jumps back to 1970, when 17-year-old Garnet Whitaker is desperate to get away from her abusive father. After Zola and Celia rescue her, she’s hired as the phone operator at the asylum, where she befriends a Deaf patient named Esther and develops a crush on one of the doctors, Eddie James. Garnet settles into her new routine and is excited for her future: “All Garnet could think of was a life of beauty, away from work and toil and dirt.” But things are not perfect—Eddie wants to keep their relationship secret, and Esther is afraid of one of the doctors. Garnet is thrown into the middle of unexpected horrors; decades later, Atlas contends with the institution’s hauntings and her family’s connection to the misdeeds that took place there 25 years earlier. Lute’s story starts strong and remains riveting throughout. The book has a few minor flaws, like the minor subplot of the curator’s possible sabotage, which frustratingly remains a loose thread. Still, the blending of Appalachian heritage and culture with genuine, edge-of-your-seat thrills is thoroughly engaging. Lute doesn’t rely solely on dramatic, spooky gimmicks—the heart of the novel is the celebration of found family and the astounding resilience of women, a story worth telling and a story definitely worth reading.
A compelling and refreshing premise delivers emotionally layered thrills.Pub Date: June 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781961609068
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Thorncraft Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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