A coming-of-age story that deals honestly with sensitive topics.
A tween girl and her friends confront small-town troubles in Hazard’s novel.
Despite its name, the town of Stillwater in upstate New York has some turbulent undercurrents. Twelve-year-old Grace Bryant and her friend Maggie Miller have a creepy encounter with their Catholic school’s janitor, who grabs one of them in a boiler room, and though some adults bizarrely blame the girls for what happened, the school’s priest has him fired. The girls, along with their other friend, Louanne Dodd, also have troubles at home. Grace’s father died when she was 8, and she misses him terribly. Both Maggie and her mother keep getting injuries that they blame on accidents, but the real cause may be Mr. Miller. Louanne’s parents are divorcing (“My dad doesn’t love me enough to stay,” Louanne tells Grace), and Grace is shocked to discover the true cause of her own father’s death. The town is plagued by arsons, and Louanne’s Uncle Tony—who’s either schizophrenic or suffering from brain damage—is a prime suspect despite a lack of direct evidence. Grace doesn’t believe he did it and devotes herself to finding who’s really at fault. In her first book for adults, Hazard deals sensitively with her adolescent characters as they gain maturity and negotiate the lies, secrets, and deep flaws of the adult world. The arson story is a compelling central point around which the rest of the story revolves, giving Grace and her friends the opportunity to practice observing and evaluating the people around them. Some plot points feel too pat, such as Mr. Miller’s quick redemption, and Tony is overly reminiscent of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, but overall, the novel is thoughtful and captures Grace’s perspective well.
A coming-of-age story that deals honestly with sensitive topics.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68401-928-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2020
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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