A bracing tale that will shake the reader.
Two young men struggle with addiction in Pyle’s historical novel.
The story begins in the 1960s in Daytona Beach, Florida. Jude Armstrong is a white kid from a messed-up middle-class family. His mother has pretty much given herself over to drink and partying; his straightlaced lawyer father has moved out. (Lansing Armstrong is not a bad dad, but he is temperamentally aloof and incapable of connecting with his son.) Jude’s friend Roosevelt Harris is a poor Black kid whose mother turns tricks to feed her habit. The boys’ addictions begin with glue sniffing and pot smoking and quickly ramp up from there. The two have become friends by happenstance, and soon they’re running with other drugged-out teens who are into much more dangerous stuff. At one point, a girl OD’s while they’re bingeing, and the cops catch them, but even that’s not enough to break the grip of the illicit substances. A second drug bust is enough to scare Roosevelt straight, but not Jude, who has to bounce along rock bottom until Roosevelt finally drags him to an A.A. meeting. The real strength of this well-written book is in its descriptions of wild drug orgies (“His brain crackled like the time he’d eaten a spoonful of horseradish. Zoooom. He was going in high speed”) and what it’s like to be a slave to your next fix (or, in the long, drawn-out case of Jude, your next drink). The author deftly catalogs all the excuses that addicts give themselves, the fleeting euphoria that rules their lives, the wallowing in self-pity, the resentment toward those who try to help, and the awful harm that they inflict on those close to them. Lansing and Roosevelt are often close to giving up on Jude, but they stick by him; this is a story of heroic caring and friendship. And yet, the final pages recount a poignant sailing trip during which Jude again faces a diabolical temptation—Pyle’s narrative has the powerful ring of truth.
A bracing tale that will shake the reader.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780985804411
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Armstrong Media Group, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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