A thoughtful, engrossing first novel.
A choreographer getting her big break faces professional and personal complications.
Layla Smart has spent 33 years following her mother’s injunction not to fulfill stereotypical notions of what someone born poor and Black is like and what she can achieve. She’s worked in PR at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for nearly a decade while slowly building a career as a choreographer. She and husband Eli have been together for eight years, and although he not-so-covertly resents her determination to move on from a recent miscarriage, he declares himself thrilled at her opportunity to be choreographer-in-residence for nine months at Vermont’s prestigious Briar House. Layla is not thrilled to realize, in her first conversation with Briar House’s director, that she has been pigeonholed as “the next great hope of the Black dance canon” and is expected to create a piece about “everything happening in the world right now…The pain. The injustice.” That’s emphatically not Layla’s style; she claims the right to have diverse influences and to make dance that’s “abstract, more concerned with shape and musicality than specific themes.” As Morrow’s well-written debut moves forward, however, we see that Layla’s resistance to stereotyping may be holding her back artistically. The abrupt replacement of one of her dancers is the first indication that there’s a lot going on under the surface at Briar House, and there will be more. Layla shares the author’s personal background in dance studies at Connecticut College and PR work at BAM, to the benefit of absorbing scenes chronicling the development of her Briar House piece and a smart understanding of how the media operates, demonstrated by the key role a New York Times article plays in the cleverly plotted denouement. But this is more than autobiography transplanted into fiction; psychologically astute portraits of Layla’s evolving relationship with Eli, her mother, and her past make her decision at the end to choose fresh artistic and personal paths well earned and satisfying.
A thoughtful, engrossing first novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780593736753
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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