An absorbing, multilayered woman headlines this engrossing tale of deceit and vulnerability.
In this drama, a Pennsylvania crime novelist complicates her latest work by getting close to the family providing her source material.
Sydney Long rolls into a small Maryland town to write about a recent murder. Bill “Swannee” Swann Jr. shot his mother while she lay in bed—just the kind of true crime that’s inspired Sydney’s last few novels. She cozies up to locals to get details on Swannee, who’s staying mum in prison, and even befriends his brother, Jake, and sister, Maggie Craill. Sydney passes herself off as a writer on a working vacation without telling anyone what her novel in progress is about. This entails a bit of deception as well as some snooping and eavesdropping. But in the process, she’s drawn to compassionate Jake and resilient Maggie. Sydney, having fought through problems in her own past, believes her book could start a “healing journey” for the siblings. But that means telling Jake and Maggie the truth, something that may obliterate the surprising intimacy they’ve gradually developed. Readers won’t immediately warm up to Sydney, who manipulates many people in a largely affable community. She’s nevertheless gleefully complex; her “pure” motives of helping the siblings through tragedy feel contrived, but Sydney seems to genuinely believe them. Her personal life, too, proves more riveting than her novel’s subject matter, as she faces hostility from Jake’s ex-fiancee and deals with a string of vaguely threatening anonymous texts (“Watch your back”). Qnert gives each of the alternating first-person narrations—Sydney’s, Jake’s, and Maggie’s—a distinctive flavor, while pithy writing keeps the engaging story moving at a steady clip. And though the murder itself is hardly the focus, a few mysteries do unravel, from certain individuals’ past abuse to some things Sydney keeps under wraps. This is a dense, character-driven tale that makes the ending both worthwhile and nearly impossible to predict.
An absorbing, multilayered woman headlines this engrossing tale of deceit and vulnerability.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 334
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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