A lighthearted witchy romp that pays homage to its predecessors but is cursed by uneven pacing.
Kilmer returns to suburbia in this white-collar tale of magic, mayhem, and sisterhood.
Twenty years ago, on an otherwise peaceful evening in September, the Hawthorne Hall dormitory at North Valley University burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was never determined, but Sarah Nelson and her best friends, Katrina Andrews and Alicia Lipschitz, know the truth: Their inexperienced, currently estranged coven was responsible for the damage done that fateful night. Now a luxury realtor with a handsome husband, charming twins, and an opinionated, four-legged familiar who enjoys binge watching pay-per-view movies, Sarah still dabbles in magic from time to time. Who wouldn’t want a little extra help cleaning the house or keeping raccoons out of the trash? But when an unexpected reunion makes the friends' innate magical abilities go haywire and, to make matters worse, a true crime podcaster starts investigating the cause of the fire, Sarah, Katrina, and Alicia are forced to reconcile with their powers before more irreparable damage is done. At its core, this novel is a love letter to the witchy stories that have come before it. Readers will appreciate the inspiration that Kilmer has taken from The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and even Charmed as Sarah and her coven navigate keeping their secret safe, protecting their families, and dealing with the often unexpected side effects of magic. Unfortunately, nostalgia isn’t enough to propel this story forward, and this falls short of Kilmer’s campy debut novel, Suburban Hell (2022). Sarah’s domestic use of magic in her day-to-day life is delightful—a scene in which her refrigerator stocks itself with 30 pounds of sandwich meat of its own accord is laugh-out-loud funny—but it's dragged down by an underdeveloped plot and two-dimensional characters.
A lighthearted witchy romp that pays homage to its predecessors but is cursed by uneven pacing.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422397
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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