A transcendent reading experience that reveals life’s darkest corners while transmitting a surprising amount of hope.
Watkins’ fierce novel follows a Black family with an inherited psychic gift—the ability to see death coming—back and forth across Texas from 1936 through 2024.
From the first pages, when baby Nannie foresees her father’s lynching in 1936, Watkins’ collage of narratives circles the Gardner family’s supernatural powers—but those powers are less plot device than metaphor for how family shapes an individual. Genetic traits, like the physical resemblance of various Gardners to their forebears, are obvious. Less clear-cut but more important is the emotional pain each generation transmits, with variations, to the next. Portrayed in stark, beautifully rendered prose, all the Gardners are damaged, but Nannie’s son, Walter, who calls himself Chuck and desperately wants to give and receive love, will break the reader’s heart. Abandoned in infancy by Nannie and the distant cousin with whom she leaves him, Chuck’s constant sense of rejection is only partly mitigated by the unconditional love he receives from the cousin’s lover, Mr. Jack, who raises him. A brilliant autodidact, Chuck is tortured by his ability to foresee deaths. Again and again he repents the bouts of adultery and addiction that endanger his marriage to his love, Lettie, while remaining constant as a loving parent to their daughters. The youngest, Baby, shares his psychic gene. Two years old when her father dies, Baby faces her own crisis 14 years later, in 1999, when she rejects her now emotionally broken mother to escape the fanatic Y2K cult Lettie has joined. By 2007, Baby has a degree in psychology and is investigating “the psychological factors and hereditary patterns…the dynamics of a family across generations.” But scientific explanations go only so far, while Chuck’s lifelong effort to overcome moral failings and be a good man takes on biblical proportions.
A transcendent reading experience that reveals life’s darkest corners while transmitting a surprising amount of hope.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9780593854549
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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