A meditation on the power of hope when all else seems lost.
A young woman’s dreams are in the hands of an eccentric author.
Lucy Hart is a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher’s assistant, desperate to adopt her orphaned former student, Christopher Lamb. Unfortunately, she lacks the funds. When Lucy wins a chance to compete in a game devised by reclusive children’s book author Jack Masterson, she hopes the competition will be the answer to her problems. Jack lives on a private island off the coast of Maine with his pet raven and his only friend, Hugo Reese, who illustrated his books, and, after years of silence, he’s finally written the next installment in his Clock Island series. Dismissing conventional channels for publishing, Jack has decided that whoever wins his competition can do whatever they like with the only copy of his book. Thus four competitors descend on the eponymous Clock Island—all of them former runaways who had gone to Jack’s island as children seeking reprieve from less-than-idyllic circumstances, and all of whom, in adulthood, have problems that only Jack can solve. Jack’s game starts off as a series of riddles (ones that readers will enjoy solving alongside the competitors) but quickly turns into something deeper as Jack, acting in the role of the Mastermind from his books, makes the competitors confront their traumas. Despite the sinister-sounding nature of the competition, Shaffer posits Jack as fatherly and loving, and Lucy and her opponents are mostly happy to play along. Shaffer’s characters are not fully developed, and Jack’s motives in particular feel a little trite. But, somewhat two-dimensional characters notwithstanding, readers will appreciate the interplay of whimsy and realism on the island: “Jack’s number one rule was Don’t break the spell. Lucy was under the spell of Jack Masterson, of Clock Island. Hugo wasn’t about to tell her that it wasn’t as wonderful as it looked, that the mysterious, mystical, magical Mastermind…had been drinking himself into an early grave for the past six years.”
A meditation on the power of hope when all else seems lost.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593598832
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
