Colleen Hoover–style romance heads to the Olympic rink. Buckle up.
Star-crossed figure skaters whiz through decades of melodrama on and off the ice.
Fargo’s latest feature pairs skaters entwined by destiny and irradiated by fan and media obsession, as she cleverly tells her tale by alternating between narrative sections and clips from the script of a fictional 2024 documentary called The Favorites: The Shaw & Rocha Story. Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha are “small-town Midwestern trash,” both orphans, he of mysterious origins. Teen lovers, they enter the world of skating at the 2000 Nationals, where they meet their rivals, brother and sister skaters Garrett and Bella Lin, the privileged twin children of figure skating icon-turned-coach Sheila Lin (and an anonymous Sarajevo Olympic Village sperm donor). For the next 14 years, violent passions, bloody on-ice accidents, bedroom betrayals, sabotage, paparazzi-driven scandals, and nonstop cliffhangers—“Unfortunately, it was only the beginning”—lead up to an epic brouhaha at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, by which time the reader’s capacity for outrage and surprise has gotten quite a workout. But don’t give up in the stretch: “NBC Sports commentator Kirk Lockwood reports live from the Sochi Olympics. ‘In all my years covering skating,’ he says, shaking his head solemnly, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’” Though the stereotype-driven characterizations of the skaters are a couple dimensions short of real or relatable—Heath in particular is a furious cipher—Fargo does a nice job with the narrators of her documentary. One of them, a former skater turned gossip blogger named Ellis Dean, can be relied on to spill the tea (“That program was the most passive-aggressive shit I’d ever seen—and I’m from the South, honey”), while an uptight U.S. Figure Skating official dryly tows the party line: “Ice dance can have a certain sensuality to it, yes. Many programs express the beauty of the love between a man and a woman. But what Ms. Shaw and Mr. Rocha were doing bordered on vulgarity.” After all the histrionics and hormones, the unlikely ending Fargo bestows on her characters is a hoot.
Colleen Hoover–style romance heads to the Olympic rink. Buckle up.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593732045
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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