Radically inventive, compassionate, and perspicacious. Compulsively page-turning.
A patient navigator at a gender-affirming care nonprofit traces and retraces the swampy contours of a uniquely disruptive summer.
Ro and their partner, Liam, live on the Florida Panhandle in an uneasy equilibrium—with each other, with their finances, with a world often hostile to queer and neurodivergent people. One summer, “early in the sixth extinction and late in the pandemic” (read: 2023), another character joins them in their remote cottage on the edge of a retention pond: a pervasive, stubborn, defiant joy. The arrival of this joy, inextricably tied to its own departure by the laws of causality and the physics of time, is Ro’s keystone as they recount the summer’s events. There’s a visit from Quentin, an emancipated teen who “was not our child, at least not by blood nor in any legal way, though he called himself our child, or sometimes our son,” on his way to college and eager to start testosterone therapy. There’s Ro’s new diagnosis of autism and the overhanging trauma of a recent hospitalization for suicidality. There’s the turbulent political landscape and the machinations of anti-trans organizers, offering disastrous ramifications for Ro’s life and work. And then there’s Mad Eden, an experimental serial fantasy work posted anonymously to autism subreddits (“the boards”; glimpses into the dynamics of internet subculture here are excruciatingly accurate), its verbiage entirely sourced from the scholarly article Autism as a Disorder of Prediction. The paper is a real one, published in 2014, but it is the novel’s magic entirely that takes the article’s hypothesis and runs, bounding, to new storytelling potentialities. In their debut novel, Thomas demonstrates thrilling control of their craft, delivering a story as thoughtfully constructed as it is exhilarating to read. Ro and Liam are as real and compelling as characters come, their relationship providing the tangible fabric of the novel. There is true symbiosis here between form and content, and it is, simply put, “joyful, that word which suggests two separate things: a substance and its vessel.”
Radically inventive, compassionate, and perspicacious. Compulsively page-turning.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780374620158
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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