Smart and vivid, this novel will appeal to readers who understand nothing works for everyone, but everyone still wants love.
An LA woman on the brink of her 40s confronts familial, professional, and romantic upheavals when she winds up alone in New York during the pandemic.
Lured to New York from California by the prospect of having her TV treatment picked up, Layla Moody—originally from Queens, now marooned by herself in her mother’s Forest Hills apartment—learns in early 2020 that Covid-19 has shut down the city that never sleeps, along with any chance of video production. Fresh from facing industry slings and arrows at Sundance, where her hopes were fed by meeting an acclaimed feminist director, Layla is also smarting because her boyfriend, Nathan, has ghosted her and started seeing another woman. She hasn’t been back to the East Coast in the seven years since her father’s death; her mother, always distant, lives in Florida and rarely offers sound advice beyond telling her to get out of New York and reminding her to make brisket using a bottle of ketchup. The writing is fast and funny while Layla faces dilemmas like being frozen out by her best friend from college, who’s quarantining with her husband and daughter, and fast and furious when a chance encounter with an old boyfriend brings back memories of a momentous decision. All this feels like a pale setup for the book’s last third, in which Layla chooses, against the advice of friends and family, to spend her summer on Fire Island in a share house she once frequented, Mermaid LeGoon, run by a man known as Tequila Ted. Although Layla’s life "Before Corona" and "Alone in the Time of Corona" (as the first two sections are called) is vivid and relevant, the characters on Fire Island are more so. The book reads well but might have been stronger with a single setting and more backstory.
Smart and vivid, this novel will appeal to readers who understand nothing works for everyone, but everyone still wants love.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781636143088
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
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