A tale of second chances delivered with wit and heart.
Self-made Stafford Hopkins may be “a successful man, his happiness maintained by diet, exercise, and well-planned trips to fine places,” but his more modest past is about to return and claim him.
Finn’s quirkily engaging debut has redemption stamped all over it. Its central character, former TV network supremo Stafford, is now enjoying an involuntary retirement while continuously sparring with his wife, Agnes, all part of their feisty three-decades-long marriage. Stafford, whose origins are in small-town Canada, is secretly carrying a lifelong burden of guilt regarding his best friend from childhood, Bobby Shepherd. Agnes too has a murky history, “the uneducated and illegitimate daughter of a drug-addled suicide from Wisconsin.” But having made millions, Stafford has reached a place of cushioned and luxurious security, moving among homes in Los Angeles, New York, and Aspen. Yet it’s the couple’s custom-built retirement house in Maui where the book’s action mainly takes place, during some 10 days in March, 2003. The pair have one child, Callie, now a grown woman, smart but spoiled, whom they acknowledge to have parented badly. And then, after a distant, fatal car crash, a letter arrives out of the blue which will pull Stafford back into his remote past and deliver a responsibility that upends everything. Finn’s style is mordant and often comic, dotted with Agnes and Stafford’s snippy exchanges that can be reminiscent of Hepburn and Tracy. The novel’s central section—burdened by an overload of history, both general and specific, after Stafford returns to his homeland—sags in places, but elsewhere the narrative confidently entertains. Its concluding chapters see a change of tone and perspective, and wrap up rather tidily, but the softening leads to a place of tenderness rather than sentimentality.
A tale of second chances delivered with wit and heart.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781538776186
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Cardinal
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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