An enticing premise and promising characters, but in desperate need of focus.
Eco-horror arrives in Baywood, a small coastal California town.
The students of Baywood High are uneasy and irritated. They gripe: “Now, all kinds of adults are pretending to die. Deading. That’s what we call it, have been calling it, because, well, we’ve done it before, like more than a year before the adults ever thought to start their stupid version.” The kids deaded to make a point, but now something eerie is happening with the adults, “something completely unrelated. Something similar. Everywhere in Baywood, people lying on sidewalks and streets.” The chapters pivot among different perspectives to tease out what’s happening. Then an esoteric cult called the Risers appears amid the supernatural chaos to heighten anxieties about the current situation. The characters include Bernhard Vestinos, the owner of an oyster farm; Chango Enriquez, one of his employees; Chango’s teenage brother, Blas, an avid birder; Ingram Evans, an older birder; and Kumi Sato, Ingram’s friend. At a certain point, it’s hard to keep track of all the characters, though Chango and Blas are persistent standouts because of their relatable sibling interactions. The story is told from every possible point of view: Chapters from different third-person perspectives meld with a collective “we” that represents the teens of Baywood. One chapter uses the second person “you,” and several are told in the first person. Scientific information about oysters and birds is fascinating but eventually overtakes the plot. Blas and his fellow students are smart, cleareyed, sardonic, sometimes apathetic in a way that captures adolescence. They’re fed up with the adults’ lack of action in the important matters that caused them to “dead” in the first place: “We did it to make fun of ourselves. We did it because we die and it isn’t fair. You see, we’d already held GUN CONTROL rallies, BLACK LIVES MATTER rallies, EARTH DAY rallies. Those always got us nowhere. Adults don’t listen. We know that.” Admirably, these teen characters continue to place blame where it belongs.
An enticing premise and promising characters, but in desperate need of focus.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781645661290
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Erewhon
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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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