An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.
In Land’s novel, a young man tries to access his spirituality with guidance from a teacher.
Uncanny events punctuate Gabe’s life: At 6 years old, his hand passes through a toy train he holds; a couple of years later, he floats in a vast abyss after his bedroom walls “[peel] back like layers of paper.” As the years pass, otherworldly events keep happening. Touching a heavy wooden bedframe with one finger, Gabe watches the bed easily slide over, and he walks away unscathed from the collision of his Mustang Mach II with an oncoming pickup truck. In a California coffee shop, searching for meaning in his life, Gabe encounters an older man, Elias, and feels “a hum of presence.” In subsequent meetings held in outdoor locations, such as parks, forest clearings, riverbanks, and meadows, Elias guides Gabe to an understanding of life as a game that we play many times. They consider figures who believed in themselves and overcame doubt, including Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Wim Hof, and Elon Musk. After all the dialogues, the hardest work begins: Gabe has learned the rules, but must relinquish the fear and resistance that keep him from achieving full spiritual mastery. Gabe and Elias are the only two characters in this book, and little happens in each chapter aside from conversations. The characters don’t exactly sound like real people as they constantly grapple with elevated concepts such as the soul, god, and karma, but this seems intentional. Rather than inhabiting personalities, they embody roles: pupil and mentor. More conflict might have been beneficial to the story, however, as Gabe is exceptional from the start. Land’s vivid descriptions of nature add engaging flourishes, helping to ground readers between the volleys of intense dialogue; a park where Gabe meets Elias is a “mosaic of tall trees, swatches of green grass, and gravel paths that crunched underfoot.” The text may lead readers to other thinkers (a resource guide is available at the end) while also offering inspiration of its own; the author repeats the new ideas and rules Gabe learns in easy-to-understand, bullet-pointed lists.
An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765262016
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
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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