Community and justice go under a microscope in this thought-provoking novel.
A young man returns home and gets much more than he bargained for in West’s Southern gothic novel.
After graduating from the University of Tennessee, RJ Burnette takes his business degree to New York City, leaving behind his small Appalachian hometown of Gizzard’s Holler. But he feels hollow working as an investment banker and quits to go back to Gizzard’s Holler, accompanied by his only companion, his dog, Winston. Because of the way he skipped town, RJ finds himself with a lot of fences to mend. As a late-in-life surprise baby, RJ never had much of a relationship with his already adult brothers James and Ralph, and his older sister, Sue Ann, died young. He moves back in with his mother, Nita, who proceeds to beguile him with family stories. Life is good for RJ until he discovers what the rest of the town already knows: Nita has terminal cancer. Just before Nita dies, she takes RJ into the woods and tells him, “This is where Sue Ann was murdered.” Learning more about his sister’s killing, despite the town’s resistance, becomes RJ’s obsession. West deftly limns both RJ and Gizzard’s Holler, the place that he never truly understood until after his return (RJ is like many young adults who leave the small towns they know, only to realize later what they’ve lost). In this engaging story, RJ is surprised when his hometown isn’t ready to welcome him back with open arms—the residents now doubt he can be trusted, so they withhold information about Sue Ann’s murder from him. The author sets up a compelling dynamic in which RJ must determine what he can live without knowing; the town isn’t going to change, so he must. Everything comes together in a shocking conclusion that readers won’t soon forget.
Community and justice go under a microscope in this thought-provoking novel.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798989475339
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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