A sparkling later-in-life tale that spills over with wit, warmth, and humanity.
In Benedict’s novel, an aging woman gets a new lease on life when her mother dies and a scandalous secret comes to light.
At 63, Viola Sagewood Bluff isn’t exactly seeking reinvention. It’s true that she’s in a passionless marriage. Her love of painting has withered away, and her husband, Anthony, is chronically unappreciative. (A text exchange captures their malaise: “Today is garbage day,” Anthony writes, and Viola retorts, “Every day is garbage day when I’m with you, darling.”) Despite these issues, Viola’s simmering, low-level unhappiness is moderately tolerable. That is until the death of her opinionated mother, Rosemary, who leaves a scandalous confession involving Anthony in her wake. Ironically, Rosemary’s death could be just the thing to resuscitate Viola’s humdrum life. Returning to her Boston childhood home to prepare for her mother’s visitation is an emotional trial. Viola’s bereft, but she’s also angry at Rosemary over her posthumous confession. Infuriatingly, it’s impossible to confront a dead woman. Or is it? Viola starts having imaginary conversations with her mother that oscillate between pleasant and combative and are often addressed to Rosemary’s beloved, form-imprinted recliner. When Anthony can’t attend Rosemary’s service, Viola relishes an exhilarating taste of freedom. She meets a fetching man, described as a “sixty-ish Sean Connery,” creates an online dating profile, and returns to painting. Are a new romance and career in the offing, or is Viola’s old life worth salvaging? Breathing energy into stories centered around grief is tough, but Benedict pulls it off—the pages crackle with comedy, providing contrast and balancing the heavier subject matter. (“She’s with the angels now,” Rosemary’s friend tells Viola. “The dark angels,” Viola mutters.) The narrative jumps between present and past, and while at points the latter sections impede the momentum, Viola’s messy mishaps and glorious wins will keep readers turning the pages. It’s refreshing to follow this unlikely protagonist as the author gives a starkly underrepresented demographic some deserved attention. Viola commands this narrative, flourishing on her own terms—she’s complicated, fed up, and funny as hell.
A sparkling later-in-life tale that spills over with wit, warmth, and humanity.Pub Date: May 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781954584532
Page Count: 270
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2026
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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