There’s plenty here for Ojeda’s fans, but the glass needs a lot of cleaning before one can see through the window.
Seekers of all stripes congregate in the Andean páramo for a mystical music festival.
Noa and Nicole, 18, best friends, make the pilgrimage from their hometown of Guayaquil, Ecuador, a place rocked by the violence of men and mountains alike. Noa is on the hunt for her father, who left her as a child, and Nicole is focused on Noa, tied to her in the intensely intimate friendship of young women. Once at the festival, Solar Noise, they connect with others: Pamela and her partner, Fabio; Pedro and his partner, Carla; Mario and his friends Adriana and Julián. They mosh, do shrooms, have sex, dance with Diablumas, listen to songstresses, and congregate around a mysterious figure known as the Poet. Over the days of the festival, Noa seems to transform, unlocking an inner voice as powerful as the volcanic landscape. Interspersed with the events of the festival are selections from Noa’s father’s notebook, reporting on a long-ago visit from Noa and Nicole. Chapter headings tell us 10 years have passed on the Andean calendar; narrative cues tell us the passage of time here does not align with our usual linear conception. Outside of the journal, the novel’s narrative voice is a rotating first-person that visits the minds of Nicole, Mario, Pamela, and Pedro in turn, with diffusely mythological interludes by the festival songstresses themselves. Each voice feels less like a singular character and more like a member of the chorus, just another thread in the novel’s tangled web of words and ideas. Tonally, too, the prose—resonant, brusquely declarative—is often reminiscent of classical theater. It’s an approach that reflects its subject matter, leaving the impression of a symphony underpinning the world. At the same time, polyphonic narrative satisfies best when each character brings a truly unique perspective, and, in reaching for cohesion, Ojeda’s characters flounder for distinction. Pamela is the standout, the one character instantly discernible from the novel’s morass, regardless of context.
There’s plenty here for Ojeda’s fans, but the glass needs a lot of cleaning before one can see through the window.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781566897556
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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