A smart debut that feels rooted in the experiences of a generation and establishes McKenna as a gifted writer.
As a soon-to-be mom braces for major life changes, her best friend wrestles with a secret that could have enormous implications for the pregnancy.
This sparkling first novel focuses on the intertwined lives of three Londoners and their broader networks of friends and family, largely over the course of a single weekend in June 2019. Thirty-year-old art school graduate Maggie, her longtime boyfriend, Ed, and her best friend, Phil, have known each other since they were kids running around Basildon, a working-class town 40 minutes away by train; Ed’s mother and Phil’s parents are neighbors, and Phil’s older brother is Ed’s best friend. When Maggie tells Phil one Saturday that she’s pregnant and that she and Ed are moving back to Basildon to prepare for the baby, he doesn’t react the way she expects, but not for the reason she thinks. For Phil, the news rekindles a decade-old moral dilemma. Much as Phil has tried to put the past behind him, he knows something about Ed that Maggie doesn’t—a secret so big it could threaten Ed and Maggie’s relationship. With the impending addition of a baby to the mix, he feels more compelled than ever to reveal the truth. Concurrently, other problems arise in their peripheral social circle and beyond. Ed battles private demons. Phil’s older brother and Ed’s best friend, Callum, disappears. Phil and Callum’s mother, Rosaleen, is trying to figure out the best way to disclose her cancer diagnosis to Phil. Phil is sorting out his feelings for his housemate and hookup partner, Keith, who’s in an open relationship with another man, Louis. Things come to a head at a massive party held at Phil’s warehouse commune home on Saturday night in honor of the summer solstice. In another pair of hands, the compressed timeline and the size of the cast could have made for a disjointed reading experience, but McKenna toggles among the different characters and storylines with aplomb. What emerges is an empathetic portrait of millennials trying to build lives for themselves amid social, political, and ecological change.
A smart debut that feels rooted in the experiences of a generation and establishes McKenna as a gifted writer.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063319974
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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