A deeply felt novel whose characters will feel familiar and fresh all at once.
A group of high school students face burgeoning authoritarianism in Laser’s future-set novel.
The story takes place in 2045, which looks much like our present, aside from updated technology and a political climate that resembles that of the 2020s United States but extrapolates what effect an additional two decades of ideological division might have. In the shadow of encroaching neo-fascism, the students at Ocean Park High in coastal New Jersey still live through familiar adolescent dramas. Bob is the new kid, more conservative than his classmates but with an open, inquisitive mind; Kristi, soon to be a full-fledged activist, rails against the indignities being done to the Constitution. Oliver and Fuzzy are the class clowns and resident videographers who work at a store with Elora Shalom, a Chinese American girl whose physician mother is in the throes of a mental health crisis. Then there’s lonely Danai, a somewhat recent arrival from Africa who’s ashamed to tell her classmates that she makes ends meet by cleaning houses with her mother and contends daily with the realities of being an undocumented immigrant. Finally, there’s Cardo, the school’s resident heartthrob, who’s doing some not-so-secret business of his own dealing underground apps to classmates while pining for Elora, the one girl he can’t get to notice him. If these characters, who feel comfortingly familiar, remind readers of high school archetypes, that’s because they are; but while Laser hasn’t reinvented the wheel here, all of these teenagers’ personalities are drawn with enough individuation to allow them to rise above mere type. (“Danai laughed, until she saw that her mother was crying. She worried that her mother would never forgive her for laughing so soon after her father had died.”) Political dystopia is a common element in today’s literary landscape, but Laser takes time to bring real pathos to his characters rather than treating them as pawns deployed for satirical or political aims. The result is a narrative that is both engaging and memorable.
A deeply felt novel whose characters will feel familiar and fresh all at once.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798218896010
Page Count: 319
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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