Welch’s book shines a light on class and cultural differences and how they can be overcome through love and sheer...
Cultural conflict ensues when a well-to-do mother takes a troubled undocumented Mexican girl under her wing.
In Welch’s precarious blend of fact and fiction, Mia Sanchez is left with her grandparents as an infant after her mother flees Oaxaca, Mexico, for the United States. Readers meet Mia when she’s 10 years old, and her mother, Carmen, has returned to reclaim her and bring her to America. Despite Mia’s desperate pleas to remain with her beloved grandparents, she’s forced to endure an arduous journey to the border and a dangerous illegal crossing before landing in her mother’s overcrowded apartment in Southern California. Although Mia speaks no English, Carmen enrolls her in fifth grade soon after and then tasks her with caring for her three young American-born half sisters. Some years later, Mia meets Helen Parker, a middle-aged, upscale volunteer at a community center dedicated to tutoring and mentoring underprivileged youngsters. Helen is still grieving the death of her youngest teenaged son, who overdosed on drugs four years earlier. Over the coming months, Mia and Helen bond. Helen provides stability and guidance in Mia’s life and helps calm her stormy relationship with Carmen. But in high school, Mia becomes involved with Diego, a gang member from El Salvador. Her life takes a dangerous turn, leading Helen to assume temporary guardianship; she brings Mia home to live with her. Welch’s novel is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, inspired by the author’s own experiences. Skillfully narrated in alternating chapters by Mia and Helen, the story is a detailed and occasionally heartbreaking portrait that pays special attention to the physical and emotional struggles of a young undocumented immigrant who lives under the shadow of possible deportation, despite her DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. Through Mia’s narration, readers are privy to the secrets she keeps hidden from Helen, who, in turn, is poorly equipped to recognize or ease the turmoil brewing just below the surface.
Welch’s book shines a light on class and cultural differences and how they can be overcome through love and sheer determination.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798896363422
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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