A highly creative take on a spiritual awakening.
Russo’s supernatural novel centers around a most unusual small-town hardware store.
Cedar Springs, Massachusetts, is home to Manning’s Hardware, which has been in the Manning family for generations. The store was built ages ago on land that had a “resonance in the soil”; now, it’s run by Noble Manning. Noble likes to keep to his routine: He gets up at 6:15, eats the same breakfast of oatmeal every day, and ensures that each item in the store is “in its designated place.” But lately things have been a little different—despite Noble’s well-honed organizational efforts, “Tools migrated between shelves overnight; quantities shifted like quantum variables refusing to be measured.” Late one night, Noble receives a call from his daughter, Sarah, who reports that a family heirloom in her possession—her grandmother’s key—is glowing. The next evening, Noble is visited by a mysterious entity called the Night Walker, who explains that beings like him appear “wherever worlds meet.” The Night Walker informs Noble that Cedar Springs is currently at a crossroads; Noble must either “step into the full power” of who he is or spend the rest of his life “wondering what might have been.” In addition to the oddities around Manning’s Hardware, the book includes intriguing characters like Noble’s wife, Eleanor, whose photography has produced magical images, and a woman named Rosa who used to organize the store according to “the hidden relationships between objects and their purposes” (clearly, this is retail on a different level). The novel’s early chapters are slow going, but the idea of a hardware store as the locus of such strange things happening is compelling—the story only grows odder and more engaging as the peculiar events in Cedar Springs ultimately come under official government scrutiny due to a “Category Four magical emergence.” This strange tale has deep lessons to impart about appreciating the magic that appears from unexpected places.
A highly creative take on a spiritual awakening.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9798218803339
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 16, 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
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