A chilling and twisted fairy tale.
Estranged adult siblings unearth secrets buried decades earlier in YA author Albert’s ambitious adult debut.
The Sharpe siblings are infamous on and off the page, thanks to their enigmatic mother, Edith, who wrote them into her beloved and enduring Ninth City series of fantasy novels. Now an adult, Guinevere is promoting a ghostwritten memoir about her childhood at the family’s secluded Vermont farmhouse. As the anointed keeper of the Sharpe legacy, Guin will do anything to protect her mother’s reputation and, in turn, her own. When her older brother, Ennis, an artist—whom she hasn’t seen since she was 11—undercuts her release by announcing an upcoming new show called "Mother," her carefully curated life begins to crumble. She’s scared about what he might want, but even more terrified of what his art might reveal. Once inseparable, Guin and Ennis braved their complicated, upsetting, and confusing childhood together: “She was underfed and isolated; she was envied and dreamed about. Her whole life was limned in shadow and gold.” They were two halves of a whole until a tragedy left them orphaned and forever in the shadow of their mother’s unfinished series. As Ennis’ opening approaches, Guin finds herself unable to continue ignoring the darkness bubbling to the surface. The story alternates between present-day New York and 1990s Vermont, with dashes of the early 2000s. Albert balances traditional storytelling, fairy-tale elements, and inventive narrative structures like museum labels to create a novel way of looking at the places where the past and the present—both real and imagined—meet. Once it’s revealed, the truth—of the farmhouse, their mother, and Ennis’ reason for leaving—is darker and stranger than Guin could have imagined. Though the novel effectively maintains a sense of suspense and dread, it sometimes struggles under the weight of multiple nonlinear timelines. Regardless, Albert’s prose is undeniably beautiful as she contemplates memory, family lore, and the ways that art can both save and destroy people.
A chilling and twisted fairy tale.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063487437
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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