A vivid tale of friendship, grief, and love.
Curry’s coming-of-age novel, set in Key West, explores how bonds of youth can transform as one gets older.
Nine-year-old Jack Calder, a fourth-generation Bahamian American, meets Claire Winslow, a newcomer from Maine who’s moved to Key West after the death of her mother. She’s the same age as he is, and the island’s rhythms shape their childhood friendship as they spend afternoons fishing off docks, whispering secrets under banyan trees, and having dinners at Jack’s house, where his mother folds Claire seamlessly into the family, treating her as if she were her own daughter. As they grow up, their creative voices emerge: Jack becomes passionate about writing, and Claire’s artistic talents develop through painting; their art helps them both learn how to express their grief. Claire goes on to experience further tragedy, which the author handles with sensitivity, showing how her sorrow deepens her art and how Jack struggles to bridge the gap between friendship and love. Their friendship tips over the edge with a kiss on Christmas Tree Island, the heart of the narrative, and blossoms into romance as they move into Jack’s family’s home after graduation. Key West itself is effectively a character, portrayed in sensuous specificity: “On a bright, cloudless day, you can drift above the reef and look down 60 feet to the ocean floor. The sunlight dances across the sand, revealing every delicate ripple, every darting fish, and every brittle branch of coral in stunning detail.” At times, the prose dwells a little too heavily on description, which slows the pace, but the island’s atmosphere still becomes the novel’s most distinctive strength. What further elevates the work is the balance between nostalgia and forward motion; Claire yearns for the horizon while Jack remains rooted, but the book asserts that permanence can coexist with longing, when reframed as creation—their art, their shared spaces, and their fierce devotion to each other become the titular light in their lives.
A vivid tale of friendship, grief, and love.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
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