An intriguing story that questions what makes for a successful life.
A compassionate man doggedly follows his strange destiny despite frequent uncertainty in Stone's novel.
Duncan Graham tries to avoid living an extraordinary life. His mother, McKenna, and his absentee father, Ethan, were star-crossed lovers from feuding Scottish clans. The unwed couple separated, with Ethan sending McKenna and Duncan to America to avoid scandal. Duncan enjoys a normal life growing up with a single mother until he is 11 years old—that’s when he magically cures his best friend Timmy’s polio (“The room filled with light”) and discovers that he is a healer. Duncan does his best to keep his gift a secret, using it sparingly as he grows into adulthood, but he’s thrust into the public eye when he’s forced to save a young woman struck by a car. Duncan is uncomfortable in the spotlight, but he holds meetings at a former church to heal people, eventually moving to a bigger facility. Thanks to negative publicity generated by those he couldn’t cure, Duncan’s “ministry” flounders, and he also suffers serious personal reversals. It isn’t until Duncan accompanies McKenna’s body home to Scotland that he truly begins to understand his power. He begins roaming the world and helping others, leading to a fateful reunion. In Duncan, Stone has created a totally believable character; he reacts as anyone would if they received a life-saving power with no owner’s manual. (Actually, he likely does better than most, as Duncan leads with his heart and uses his gift to benefit others.) The narrative is affecting as friends slip in and out of his life, and even his mother, who knows more than she lets on, frustratingly leaves him alone to navigate his own path. The author makes it annoyingly difficult to keep track of time—while it is clear that the novel covers Duncan’s life, it’s less evident how many decades this entails. Still, Stone triumphs in building an admirable character who succeeds despite his gift.
An intriguing story that questions what makes for a successful life.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798999189806
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Stone Literary LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
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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