An exploration of love, belief, and self-reclamation that hums with the conviction that creation is an act of survival.
A woman undertakes a transformative, music-driven journey in Cookie’s novel.
Set in the American Midwest, Los Angeles, and Belize, the story follows Terri, a woman whose life has been shaped more by endurance than confidence, as she steps into a world that refuses to conform to her expectations. Drawn by love and circumstance, she travels to Belize with Reynold, a charismatic musician whose ambitions are as expansive as the landscape they traverse. From the moment Terri arrives, the sensory richness of the place—its heat, music, food, and spiritual traditions—begins to unsettle her sense of control. “The heavy air wraps around her, carrying strange, beautiful scents of sea salt and tropical flowers,” she observes early on, already aware that the rules she knows no longer apply. Terri’s marriage to Reynold strains under unspoken resentments, cultural misunderstandings, and power imbalances that surface gradually, often in quiet moments rather than dramatic confrontations. Reynold’s vision of music as salvation—referring to the musical note, “Mi will create music for the world to hear”—runs parallel to Terri’s own search for meaning, though the two are not always in harmony. As Terri encounters Garifuna, Maya, and African diasporic traditions, spiritual guides and rituals enter the narrative—not as spectacles, but as lived realities. One character warns her, “Life is fraught with challenges. Every problem is a sharp blade cutting the path between success and failure,” a line that encapsulates the book’s theme of growth through discomfort. Midway through the narrative, the stakes intensify as motherhood comes into focus. Terri’s identity as a mother—protective, fearful, and fiercely loving—drives the plot in the story’s second half, pushing her into spaces where faith, folklore, and intuition intersect. Music becomes both a map and a language, echoing through scenes of travel, ritual, and memory. Even moments of tenderness carry an undercurrent of unease, as when Terri reflects on belonging and realizes how easily devotion can slide into self-erasure.
The writing leans heavily on imagery and rhythm, often borrowing the cadences of songs and oral storytelling. Lines such as “Stars glitter and stretch across the heavens, scattered diamonds across black velvet” sit beside more grounded observations about marriage, illness, and emotional dependency. This tonal oscillation mirrors Terri’s internal conflict; she’s pulled between skepticism and belief, autonomy and surrender. Later reflections reveal a growing self-awareness as Terri comes to understand that “pain can become her greatest teacher,” not through abstraction but through lived consequence. As a work of magical realism with elements of spiritual fiction and women’s literary drama, the book resists easy categorization. Its supernatural aspects are never fully separated from psychology or culture; instead, they coexist, shaped by ancestry, music, and place. At times, the ambitious narrative—which incorporates Christian symbolism, Indigenous cosmology, and New Age spirituality—can feel dense, but this density is a strength, reflecting a worldview in which meaning is layered rather than singular. Ultimately, this is a story about listening—to music, to our ancestors, to one’s own buried instincts. Terri’s journey is about transformation through reckoning as she learns to name what she wants and what she has ignored.
An exploration of love, belief, and self-reclamation that hums with the conviction that creation is an act of survival.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798888249925
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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