An extraordinary, darkly comical story of flawed characters who both embrace and disregard the outside world.
In Burleigh’s satirical novel, artists in an upstate New York hamlet wallow in their soap-operatic lives as catastrophic floods close in on their village.
After friends of documentary filmmaker Drew Pierce remember him at his funeral, the narrative jumps back to the week before, when all their lives seemed relatively normal. In the flashback, Sal Hanford, a UNICEF documentarian, is having an affair, and her musician husband is apparently oblivious. But although her Californian lover is exciting, he can’t quite give her the warmth that she gets at home. Bliss St. Ours, who met her husband at art school, runs the Henderson Happy House—a camp for undergraduate art school students in Canawunk, New York; in practice, it seems more like a work camp to improve Bliss’ property (since residents paint walls, for example). Meanwhile, Drew’s wife, Grace, wants a divorce because he can’t overcome his OxyContin addiction, even after spending thousands of dollars on multiple stays in rehab. Everyone plans to attend a summer’s-end party at Bliss’ place, although a hurricane recently hit Florida, which promises heavy rain, flash flooding, and devastation to come. Burleigh’s engaging novel, set in 2012, is the second in a loosely connected trilogy. It teems with engaging characters, even when they’re self-serving and not especially sympathetic. For example, many worry about environmental issues, such as climate change and the BP oil spill, but they’re content with showing that concern solely through their art; one character, for instance, builds an ice polar bear and displays it in the desert in response to news of a melting glacier in the Arctic. Petty troubles amusingly take precedence over worries about devastating flood waters, even as meteorologists continually offer warnings. At another point, the narrative wryly paints Bliss as “too much of a feminist to concede that she’d strategically shot-gunned” her husband into marriage. Still, the author dives deep into individual psyches, which results in some hard-hitting revelations—such as Bliss and Sal being somewhat disheartened by motherhood, and the implication that Drew is an abusive domestic partner.
An extraordinary, darkly comical story of flawed characters who both embrace and disregard the outside world.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798218921705
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Four Sticks Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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