A compelling yarn with fresh characters and classic literary themes.
In Becker’s novel, a group of estranged friends uneasily reunites in their small Maine hometown.
In Augusta, Maine, high school students Billy and Dustin are the best of friends. Both standouts on the football team, they’re popular and are slated to earn university scholarships to Division 1 football programs. That is, until Billy sustains a freak injury—or what seems like a freak injury—at practice, fracturing his tibia and ending his football dreams. Tragically, the player who injured Billy is none other than Dustin. The boys’ friendship never recovers, and when they break up with their respective girlfriends—Billy with Jessica, whom he never gets over—the members of their friend group officially go their separate ways. Dustin leaves to play football at Baylor, and Jessica heads to New York to pursue her studies. While his friends flourish in their adult lives, Billy languishes in Augusta and earns a reputation as a nice guy with a bad drinking problem, someone the locals feel bad for but don’t want to meet outside the bar at the end of a long night. (“He would have taken a drink from any of the water bottles decorating the coffee table, something to sweep away the cotton in his mouth, but his stomach flipped at the thought. It didn’t sympathize with what had become an all-too-familiar condition. Hangovers are the sentences of trials lost the night before, his boss at the quarry liked to say”). When Billy discovers that Jessica has returned home to be with her terminally ill mother, he can’t help but pine for—and pester Jessica with—his hopes of reconciliation. But Jessica isn’t the only one back home, as Billy’s old pal Dustin has also reemerged. After Jessica finds a drunken Dustin passed out on the side of the road, it seems a romance may spark between her and Dustin instead. Billy doesn’t learn any of this until Andrea—another old friend who is now an intrepid investigative journalist—tells him. She happens to know that Dustin never finished college, and the reason why is disturbing (even if it’s not as shocking to Billy as one might hope). And Dustin isn’t the only one hiding something—a secret of Jessica’s has followed her to Maine, too.
Readers who enjoy small-town dramas will find no shortage of interpersonal intrigue here, as each of Becker’s characters is adept at keeping secrets from one another. The relationships feel real—the friendships are as authentic as the romances, and some of the novel’s best moments occur during the interplay between Billy and Andrea. Moments of larger social observation abound, as well: “When people were allowed to vote with their dollars, they inevitably voted for their own annihilation.” The elements readers expect from an idyllic, small-town setting are all at play, including the local diner, the struggling hometown paper, and the deep wounds from barely-forgotten high school legacies. These combine in a novel that feels both familiar and fresh, comforting and challenging. As Billy navigates his own disappointments and watches as his friends’ disappointments slowly float to the surface, readers will ponder the question of whether we can ever truly leave our origins behind. A compelling yarn with fresh characters and classic literary themes.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798988881643
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Copywrite, Ink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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