An intimate, immersive paean to the redemptive power of found families and the pleasure of choosing whom and how to love.
Two American women who meet in France when they’re 20 become lifelong friends.
Milly and Val are best friends—more like sisters, really. From the time Milly, who pretty much always gets what she wants, chooses Val—agreeable, academically driven, and the only other Black student on their study-abroad program—to travel with her when the program ends, the two have remained deeply connected, even during their relationship’s inevitable times of trouble. That connection is facilitated by Helene, a well-to-do American living in France who becomes a mother figure to both of them. Both Milly and Val are lacking for actual mothers: Milly because her devoted mother has died, and Val because her abusive mother has cruelly pushed her away. Coster’s book toggles back and forth in time and, 14 years after they met, Milly and Val are accomplished in their careers: Milly is a successful lifestyle influencer in New York and Val a North Carolina journalist with a book deal. Each is married—Milly to a nurturing, handsome, and wealthy restaurateur with a family pedigree, Val to a fresh-out-of-grad school anthropology lecturer who is clever and charming but also unreliable and self-indulgent. Both women, too, are pregnant. When Milly asks Val to come back to New York, where they had been roommates for several years, so they can raise their daughters side by side, Val eagerly agrees to move her growing family to Brooklyn. But will the women’s friendship—and the women themselves—be able to grow and evolve with their shifting circumstances, expectations, and geographic proximity? In this delicious page-turner, set in such alluring locales as Paris, Provence, and Park Slope, Coster brings us two fascinating, fallible, and sometimes frustrating characters who are learning to balance freedom and responsibility—to themselves and their families, both biological and chosen. Writing with sensitivity, candor, and insight, Coster compellingly tracks the ups and downs of longstanding friendship, motherhood and daughterhood, marriage, and career. We can’t help but root for these smart, accomplished women as they seek to square the demands of those around them with their own needs, desires, and dreams.
An intimate, immersive paean to the redemptive power of found families and the pleasure of choosing whom and how to love.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9780593833278
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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