Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.
Three lost souls search for a missing woman.
When best friends Ralph “Rafe” Howell and Jeremy Cox were teenagers, they went missing in the woods of West Virginia for six months. Now, 15 years later, the two are estranged. Rafe lives in a cabin and spends his days hunting, painting, and being generally hermitic. Jeremy has an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to find lost people, and spends his time finding lost girls. Enter Emilie Wendell. Emilie’s adoptive mother recently died and, in her search to ease her loneliness, Emilie uploaded her DNA to a website that matched her with a half-sister she didn’t know existed. Here’s the catch: Emilie’s sister, Shannon Yates, went missing years ago in the same forest as Rafe and Jeremy. Emilie shows up to a TV interview Jeremy is doing and demands he help find her sister. Jeremy agrees and reveals a secret: Shannon, better known to him as Skya, is the queen of a magical land called Shanandoah. As it turns out, Jeremy and Rafe weren’t lost in the woods those many years ago but were spending their days galivanting around the secret magical kingdom whose entrance is in the forest. To return they need to enlist the help of Rafe, whose memories of Shanandoah and, more heartbreakingly, the love he held for Jeremy were erased when they left the magical world. After quite a bit of convincing, Rafe reluctantly agrees to help. What unfolds is an adventure filled with sword fights, romance, and gut-wrenching stories of the dark past that led the boys to the forest in the first place. Shaffer’s depictions of Emilie and Skya fall almost completely flat. That said, she makes up for it with the tender love between Jeremy and Rafe and the magical depiction of the world they once left behind.
Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593598870
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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