A story of identity, intimacy, and familial struggles.
A young man’s coming-of-age amid war and social unrest in the 1960s.
John Steinbeck’s novel The Winter of Our Discontent demonstrates how a local business—a grocery store—can sit at the heart of a community. It’s no coincidence that one of the characters in Zarou’s debut reads Steinbeck’s book, but there are long stretches where the establishment at the center of this novel—a grocery store owned by a Palestinian American family—fades into the background. The story opens with a brick thrown through the family’s window, one of several incidents of racism the Haddads—especially Michael, a high school student who works in the store—must contend with in the Queens Village neighborhood of New York. It’s a tumultuous time: Some local residents are heading overseas to fight in Vietnam, while the Haddads are also getting upsetting news from relatives in Palestine about the Six-Day War. The novel is at its best when it gets most specific, focusing on the ins and outs of the business and the family’s involvement in keeping the store running. Gradually, Michael embarks on a relationship with Nancy, an Italian American college student who grew up nearby. The fact that Nancy is a few years older than Michael adds more complexity to their relationship than their different ethnic backgrounds. (One of the couple’s dates is to see The Graduate, which makes for a memorable post-film discussion.) The sight of the pair out on the town—where Michael is assumed to be Greek by one waiter—gets at the shifting demographics of 1960s New York City. Unfortunately, the story incorporates even more flashpoints from the era, from white flight to a subplot about a Vietnam veteran whose heroin addiction leads him to a life of crime. The novel’s empathy and humanism are admirable, but the use of multiple 1960s tropes give the story a clichéd feeling at times.
A story of identity, intimacy, and familial struggles.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781623715632
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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