This audacious collection surprises readers with the vivid lives few of us notice.
Nine stories of guile and instinct punch up the human predicament.
It’s no surprise that a book called Brawler should provoke, ambush, and, yes, gut-punch its readers. Those familiar with Groff’s supple fiction will expect this, combined with startling, pinpoint sentences: “Human decency could still overcome hunger, then.” These nine stories follow her earlier collections, Delicate Edible Birds (2009) and Florida (2018); the stories in Florida, named after her adopted home state, crackle with the urgency of precarious lives, and won the Story Prize. This latest is more geographically diffuse but still aflame with combustible characters in harrowing corners. The first story, “The Wind,” has a prosaic title and a haunting, generational imprint as three small children and their mother use the yellow school bus as cover to try to escape domestic violence. The perpetrator, their father, is a cop; their allies work with their mother at the local hospital. In 18 pages, the title lifts into stunning poignancy and leaves the reader breathless. The final story, “Annunciation,” is almost twice as long and, like “The Wind,” told in the first person. It begins when its young protagonist’s family skips her college graduation and sends instead “a dozen carnations dyed blue and a gift certificate to a clothing store for middle-aged women.” This glint of humor serves its purpose in a tale marked by a surprise ending and a capacious eye for the improvisations of young women. The mothers in this book are often absent, drunk, emotionally remote, or ridiculous, but never villains. Instead, Groff attaches her ethical acuity to their children. She appends an author’s note, providing a kernel of motive for each of her installments. “Brawler,” about an unruly teen diver with a dying mother, exists in the wake of her own history, Groff says: “I became a writer because I was a swimmer.” In the coiling dread and frank feminism of her work, this incandescent author makes clear with her newest fiction why she won the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
This audacious collection surprises readers with the vivid lives few of us notice.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593418420
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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