This staggering gut punch of a novel shows that sometimes love looks like leaving.
In playwright Hudes’ stunning fiction debut, a mother’s letter to the daughter she left tells a profound story of love, loss, and the cost of liberation.
When her daughter Noelle’s principal reports that April Soto’s brilliant 10-year old “bludgeoned” a schoolmate, comparing her to a “runaway freight train” and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April’s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April’s violence and her need to flee were generations in the making. She “loathed having a cause and effect, being a single-source tragedy,” but the “white hot” rage of the title—her “escape hatch” and her “battery pack”—was triggered at age 5. After that, April’s memories had been rife with “skin I yanked, bone I smashed, hair I ripped in stripy bouquets.” That incandescent veil shredded her peers’ gendered expectations: “Young buls thinking they had a monopoly on rage till they saw me buy Boardwalk and put up a hotel.” Forming the bulk of the novel, April relates these events in a book-length letter from mother to daughter to be read on Noelle’s 18th birthday. By then April had been gone for eight years. When she left, April had been a 26-year-old former teen mother, a golden child turned dropout raising a gifted young girl in a house she shared with her mother and abuela. Chronicling where April went next and why, the letter is an emotionally raw explanation, not an excuse. April is ruthlessly honest, divulging family secrets and breaking a cycle of shame and sweeping things under the carpet. In blunt yet vibrantly lyrical prose, Hudes reveals the good, the bad, and the profane from April’s brutally candid perspective—including how April left Noelle without notice or plan with her abuela and great-grandmother first for 10 disastrous days and then returned briefly only to leave her for good in the care of a father and stepmother she had never known to save them both. It’s a profound journey of the soul.
This staggering gut punch of a novel shows that sometimes love looks like leaving.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593732335
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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