A surprising and enjoyable novel about camaraderie and letting go.
A sick woman asks her friends to help her die in Wasyliszyn’s debut novel.
Opal Slepecki has pancreatic cancer. Though she is not yet 55, Opal’s pancreas is “gold-star jacked up,” as she phrases it to her three best friends when they come over for drinks and macaroons in her gazebo. Having already exhausted all of her treatment options, Opal has decided the only course left for her is euthanasia—a serious crime in Minnesota—and she needs her friends’ help to do the deed. Her friends are understandably horrified, both by the revelation of her prognosis and by the requests Opal has written on cards and given to them. Luna, the beautiful, cake-baking neck model, has been tasked with collecting brown recluse spiders. Urse, the brash friend with a traumatic childhood and a burgeoning Adderall dependency, must find poison mushrooms. The loyal, possibly depressed Ruby is responsible for the most dramatic ingredient of all: heroin. The friends are worried that Opal has broken with reality—she seems unable to grasp the fact that her husband, Oliver, died six months ago—but they are willing to do whatever they can to help. (Well, almost anything.) As the pals begin their morbid scavenger hunt, a lifetime’s worth of traumas, hang-ups, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled dreams come bubbling to the surface. Shot through with penetrating insights on aging and loss, the novel is ultimately about friendships, particularly long ones. Wasyliszyn wrings plenty of humor out of her wonderfully human characters, particularly the ailing Opal: “Opal woke to the smell of flowers. I must be at my own funeral.” (When she realizes she is merely in a hospital bed, her visiting friends presenting her with a vase of lilacs, she shuts her eyes again, lamenting, “Aw, man, a hospital. The opposite of my funeral.”) In Opal’s case, the end of life is equal parts heist machinations and wry retrospective, with little time for treacly sentimentality.
A surprising and enjoyable novel about camaraderie and letting go.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798990911000
Page Count: 315
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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