Thoroughly refreshing: an astute portrait of contemporary small-town America that's genuinely fun to read.
Ryle’s 12 intertwining narratives, linked sequentially over a period of months, take a mostly upbeat look at how lives have changed in one post-Covid-19 Indiana town.
Representing the many small towns that saw an economically revitalizing influx of newcomers during the Covid pandemic, fictional Lanier struggles to balance its long-term traditional values and the more liberal outlook of the newcomers it has welcomed. The book opens with a mysterious email sent to all Lanier residents with the subject line “Invitation To Participate: Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town.” Weaving through the following stories, the survey acts as a touchstone to which characters react. In a relatively short book, Ryle richly delineates a lot of personalities, listing more than 65 in her cast of characters. Like many of them, the central five appear predictable at first until they evolve in ways unexpected to readers and themselves. Having refused to get vaccinated, grouchy former basketball coach Don Blankman was hospitalized with Covid and now needs a new lung. While publicly fulminating about sexual morality, he’s privately tortured about the long-term adulterous affair he’s carrying on and by his fear of death. When Don returns temporarily to the hospital, his wife, Joyce, enjoys her newfound independence, taking up painting and finding a new creative social circle. A member of that circle, 81-year-old Nancy, begins a romance with a retired doctor involved in downtown gentrification. Loretta Sawyer, an embittered government bureaucrat who doesn’t admit her loneliness, finds herself drawn to a hot dog vendor whose business she’s supposed to shut down because he doesn’t fit the town’s new “brand.” Loretta’s friend Rachel Barr, a self-effacing bartender, discovers a gift she can’t avoid: writing stories about her observations. Rachel’s and the author’s trenchant insights and affection for the characters, especially Lanier itself, abound. Comparisons to Olive Kitteridge are inevitable, but the tone and expansiveness of this novel-in-stories hark back to Spoon River Anthology (if not Chaucer).
Thoroughly refreshing: an astute portrait of contemporary small-town America that's genuinely fun to read.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798998954702
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Galiot Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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