A well-guided journey along the boundary between faith and doubt.
A journalist struggles to uncover a mysterious sect’s secrets—and his own.
When magazine journalist Faruq Zaidi departs on an immersion project that takes him inside a religious group known only as “the nameless,” the committed atheist thinks he’s leaving behind his own emotional turmoil following the death of his father, a devout Muslim, a year earlier. Led by Odo, an aging but vital Black Vietnam War veteran, the collective operates from a highly developed base known as the Forbidden City in California’s redwood country. Following a set of principles known as the “18 Utterances,” its members get “hipped” and are urged to remove “distortion” from their lives as they espouse an enigmatic philosophy they say emphasizes “seeing beauty and making beauty,” while believing that “death is a beautiful thing too.” In alternating sections, Cuffy intersperses the story of Faruq’s effort to overcome the increasingly puzzling and ominous obstacles to penetrating the group’s essence with the script of a documentary about the nameless’ bitter, highly publicized clash with a fundamentalist Christian church at its founding site in a small Texas town and vivid scenes of Odo’s terrifying, disillusioning experience as a teenage foot soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. As Faruq’s projected six-week reporting assignment stretches into months, his questions about the nature of the nameless and its leader’s motivations and true beliefs only grow deeper. All the while, he wrestles with his own lack of faith, along with lingering grief over the sudden death of his mother when he was 12 and the way anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the 9/11 attack only a week afterward robbed him of the opportunity to mourn her passing properly. In exploring this corner of American religious life, Cuffy follows the recent work of Bret Anthony Johnston (We Burn Daylight, 2024) and Daniel Torday (The 12th Commandment, 2023) that dealt with religious cults, but she approaches the subject with a fresh, multifaceted perspective that makes it uniquely hers.
A well-guided journey along the boundary between faith and doubt.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593597446
Page Count: 464
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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