An immersive and culturally acute coming-of-age story convincingly set on the darker side of the New York theater industry.
An aspiring Afro-Latina actress in New York City tries to reboot her life after her sister’s sudden death.
“When I was a kid, I thought I’d be rich and famous by now. I thought that I’d have a record deal or a poodle or a pool somewhere out in California. Enough money in my bank account to airlift my mother out of our tiny apartment in Washington Heights, and get my frizzy hair blown out twice a week, and buy my sister, Nena, the Mercedes-Benz she always wanted. But I’m still broke, and barely even singing in the shower, and my hair is a mess, and my sister is dead, so nothing I imagined has come true.” Xiomara Sanchez is very close to the edge, emotionally, financially, and otherwise. She’s working two jobs, one at a quick-print shop with a shady owner, the other at Ellen’s Stardust Diner, the Times Square restaurant where Broadway hopefuls wait tables and perform musical numbers, vividly recreated here. She’s sleeping with unpleasant men, fighting with her friends and her mother, powerless against the weight of her grief—until the opportunity to audition for the rare lead made for a Black woman comes up, and she makes a connection with the showrunner Manny Santos. The first-person narration has the fluid, associative character of internal monologue, immersing us in Xiomara’s experience of racism, sexism, and sexuality, of her body as it appears to herself and others. When a very nice guy is hired at the print shop, and when she progresses in the audition process, the main thing holding her back is her damaged self-esteem: Toxic situations come easier to her than healthy ones. After some brutal setbacks and judgment errors, the gritty realism of Guerrero’s debut gradually morphs into contemporary fairy tale, rewarding our princess with second chances she didn’t see coming, but finds she has the resources to grasp after all.
An immersive and culturally acute coming-of-age story convincingly set on the darker side of the New York theater industry.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593977330
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
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
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