Pervasive angst and morbidity characterize this dark anthology.
Coloman’s second short story collection, following Roxy’s Not My Girl (2019), includes a dark bouquet of narratives that often focus on women pushed to emotional extremes.
This set of works largely consists of first-person narratives of women in pain, and some are poetic flash-fiction or “contes cruels” of just a few pages in length. The nameless protagonist of the title tale calls herself “born of dirt and dusk” in a singsong refrain as she recalls a terrible father, a troubled mother, and her own downward spiral. A man named Cayce from a stable family is infatuated with her, despite her protestations about being one of the “haywired girls” and who “paid no attention to the fangs I flared at him.” For what she sees as Cayce’s own protection, she distances herself from him and continues on a self-destructive path. Other tales effectively address parental, often maternal, love gone awry, due to worry, neglect, or obsession. In “At the End of the Road,” the stricken mother of an ovarian cancer patient agonizes over whether to remain with her independent-minded daughter or give her some space. A dark tone reigns, even in a tale of a warm, successful relationship, like that of the young married couple in “The Last of Our Kind,” which comes to an apocalyptic conclusion. “Pretending,” in which another damned soul, an adoptee tormented by her birth mother’s abandonment, finds solace in a stranger’s old diary at a garage sale, is about as Chicken Soup for the Soul–ish as Coloman gets. Readers will be surprised that a few tales, with clear stylistic nods to splatterpunk fiction and the work of Hubert Selby Jr., wind up as outright horror or horror-fantasy. In “Rules to Eating a Dog’s Dead Heart,” a daughter gets revenge on her mother, a gruesome social media chef. “The Pepper Tree” finds an aged, childless woman literally bonding with her favorite tree, and “Hands That Make a Man” is a rare piece with a male protagonist in which a boy loses his blackjack-playing, casino-regular father—though not all of him. Overall, this absinthe-tinged assortment will appeal to a rebellious readership.
Pervasive angst and morbidity characterize this dark anthology.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798270083182
Page Count: 215
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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