A sensitive exploration of the power of place and the importance of creativity and community in a time of grief.
After her mother dies, a daughter returns home, finding unexpected reasons to stay.
Theater director Gwen Rivlin’s Pittsburgh-based troupe is about to open a new play when she receives word that her mother, Bobbie, has died at 54 after a fall down the stairs of the classic old turret house she’d inherited from her own parents. Gwen leaves her producing partner-with-benefits to run the show and makes the drive to Inverness, a fictional town in the Philadelphia suburbs. Her mother was a popular English teacher at the local high school, and Gwen finds both house and town to be filled with memories and afterimages of her vibrant personality. More than once she’s the one to break the news of Bobbie’s death—first, to an irate neighbor who accosts Gwen as soon as she arrives about the illegal, half-finished construction project in the backyard. Bobbie was hoping to build a cob house, a building made from a mixture of clay, sand, straw, and water, with the help of Ethan and Kamal, the gay couple who shared her home for minimal rent. Gwen not only finds herself asking them to stay on, but also inviting her childhood best friend, Lydia, and her two children to move in while Lydia is dealing with marital troubles. The prospect of returning to Pittsburgh recedes ever further into the distance as Gwen decides to stage an experimental production of The Cherry Orchard in the house. Chekhov’s play about an aristocratic family facing the loss of their home looms large in the novel—Gwen played one of the lead roles in high school, a copy now lies on her late mother’s nightstand, and the family joke was to refer to the single cherry tree in the backyard as “the cherry orchard.” As Gwen sorts through memories of her past while rediscovering the virtues of a town she had intentionally left behind, Pastan’s fifth novel explores all the ways we can and cannot go home again. With practical matters like zoning laws and housing affordability putting hard limits on her plans and dreams, will the joys of artistic expression and found family Gwen experiences in Inverness be able to take root and thrive?
A sensitive exploration of the power of place and the importance of creativity and community in a time of grief.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781953002778
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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