Grief, life, and mysterious phenomena, all in one absorbing account—to be read with the lights on.
What do you do when weird phenomena follow you throughout your life?
Chapman’s swirling narrative of sinister suspense follows Amanda Vandervelden through years of inexplicable experiences, beginning with her childhood in the 1970s Pacific Northwest. Mandy’s somewhat matter-of-fact narration of odd early events in her life includes encounters with (literally) grasping forces beneath the floor and unpleasant exposure to the contents of a witch bottle. When Mandy moves to Tacoma after her widowed mother remarries, she forges an alliance with Jeff, her new stepbrother. Both children sense the presence of things amiss in the family’s split-level home, including an erratic intercom system and the menacing presence of “something,” chiefly on the home’s lower level. Mandy has a youthful infatuation with books and media exploring “unexplained phenomena” (including the Bermuda Triangle and ESP), and might be prone to believing the unbelievable, but Chapman’s skillful slow reveal of future events leaves room for alternate explanations. Years later, once Mandy has relocated to Las Vegas and cares for her mother, now suffering from progressive dementia, she’s forced to deal with the process of moderating her own impulsivity following an ADHD diagnosis and guiding her mother though the uncertainties created by her increasingly clouded mind. Burdened by the contents of a shipping container housing the voluminous and sometimes puzzling contents of her mother’s home, Mandy attempts to sort through the accumulated and overwhelming flotsam, jetsam, and treasures of a lifetime. As she does, perplexing events begin to occur within her townhouse community. Mandy’s relationship with Jeff has deteriorated and she’s now left alone to figure out the source of all the weirdness while managing her own losses and memories. Some clues may be found only upon rereading as Chapman confronts mysteries both mundane and supernatural in her explorations of grief, loss, neurotypicality, and the value of connection in a scary world.
Grief, life, and mysterious phenomena, all in one absorbing account—to be read with the lights on.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781644453797
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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
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