A stark, unsparing exploration of the grief and loss that push one family to the limits of its endurance.
Carslaw’s novel chronicles a boy’s abandonment and his close relative’s pain.
The full measure of people in any tragedy lies in how they respond to the crisis; that’s the major life lesson for Jesse Warsaw and his aunt, Colleen, in this narrative, set in rural Pennsylvania. For Jesse, the trouble starts with his fun-loving, hard-drinking, irresponsible father, Al, who thinks nothing of zipping off to Florida and leaving his son among equally dissipated company for weeks on end. (“Steve-O looked like someone from one of those loud rock videos with ripped sleeves and spiky hair.”) The situation leaves Jesse feeling anxious and adrift, given his father’s litany of broken promises. (“He was not the type of a man to chase anything, not a dream, or a goal.”) Hoping for a fresh start, Al forces his son to join him in Florida. But their fortunes sour after Al’s partner, Georgia, abandons him, and their new home burns down, leaving them unhoused and their lives in tatters. This development opens an avenue for Colleen—fresh from finally divorcing her authoritarian, emotionally abusive husband, Lucas—to seek a reunion with Jesse. Her hopes seem unlikely, given the series of blowouts that have scuttled Al’s relationship with Lucas—including an unpaid loan for a deposit on his duplex (a “straw that had most likely started to break years ago”). But Colleen is determined to try, having found fulfillment working at Summer Haven, her friend Sharon’s horse farm. For Jesse and Colleen, the ultimate test of their relationship isn’t long in coming after she agrees to take him in (triggered by a desperate jailhouse call from Al). Only when they meet up does Jesse learn that his cousin Bobby has been killed by a drunk driver, leaving his aunt psychically frozen and unable to cope. The fuller implications of her loss become clear to Jesse in one of the book’s most poignant scenes, when he enters Bobby’s room and spots his college acceptance letter. It makes an uneasy what-might-have-been parallel for Jesse, whose own college gymnastics career is making waves across the Eastern Seaboard.
Ultimately, the characters must undertake a mental and emotional journey in which no shortcuts are allowed, as Sharon informs Colleen while reflecting on her husband’s own unexpected death by heart attack: “Loss is a tremendous weight to bear, my friend. You just have to figure out how to carry it.” Jesse must learn the same lesson as he struggles with falling grades and a newfound love of college party culture. The point is driven home, subtly but surely, via the novel’s title, which is taken from a gymnastics term for letting go at the right moment while swinging on the high bar. (Jesse finds solace in the gymnasium, where “the challenges were set right out in front of him. He could see so clearly what he needed to overcome.”) The story and characters are instantly relatable, in their nitty-gritty way—the novel will leave readers feeling refreshed and renewed, whatever losses they’ve experienced.
A stark, unsparing exploration of the grief and loss that push one family to the limits of its endurance.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798901740842
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 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
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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