A finely crafted novel about sidelined dreams and second chances.
A would-be frontwoman gets a later-in-life shot at stardom in Wilke’s novel.
Back in the 1980s, teenage Libby Conlin was the lead singer of the Los Angeles rock band Liberty, who could have been the next big thing if Libby hadn’t gotten pregnant before they could secure a major label deal. Now, she works as the bookkeeper for a shop in Hollywood; she’s a single empty-nester since her youngest went off to college. The nest does not remain empty for long: Her semi-estranged 35-year-old daughter Bridget—the one whose birth interrupted Libby’s music career—arrives out of the blue one day at Libby’s Beachwood Canyon home, newly divorced and in need of a place to stay. Libby invites her in, hoping this might prove an opportunity to repair their strained relationship. Both women decide to go back to school—Libby aims to become a full-fledged CPA, and Bridget intends to pursue an old, abandoned interest in filmmaking. As part of a documentary project, Bridget ends up uploading some of Libby’s old Liberty demos to the internet—and the internet responds. With industry interest bubbling, Libby may finally have a shot at the stardom she never achieved in her youth, and Bridget may have the chance to assuage the guilt she feels for derailing her mother’s career. But will this opportunity finally bring them together—or tear them apart for good? Wilke’s prose is chatty and fluid, pulling the reader along with Libby and Bridget as they dip their toes back into the waters of art and romance. Though the two leads are in different places in life, they both feel too old to be where they are, which adds a compelling twist to the mother-daughter dynamic. (“Please don’t revert to being a teenager, Bridget,” Libby scolds her daughter at one point. “We already did that bit, and we’re both too old for a replay.”) The music industry material and Los Angeles setting add fun color, but readers will most appreciate the attention Wilke pays to her characters’ inner lives.
A finely crafted novel about sidelined dreams and second chances.Pub Date: April 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781960573704
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2025
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
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