With its profound portraits of both Amish and secular characters and their luminously real community, this is a must-read.
A giant boy with colossal gifts is born in a Wisconsin Amish community.
Rindo’s second novel, following several story collections, reveals a writer at the height of his powers. Its title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem; at the center of the tale is a well-worn book of Dickinson’s work. Passed to an Amish woman, Hannah Fisher, in a cedar chest of her mother’s things she receives when the older woman dies, it represents a secret rebellion against the strictures of their faith via Dickinson’s humanist spirituality. As the book opens, Hannah’s daughter, Rachel, is in the throes of labor, and her 17-year-old son, Jasper, brings her to the local veterinarian, Thomas Kennedy, for help, but she dies shortly after delivering an 18-pound infant, Gabriel. Rachel has never named the father of either boy, and she’s long been excommunicated for keeping her silence. Thomas Kennedy and Hannah Fisher are among a group of four residents of rural Lakota, Wisconsin, who pass the narrative torch in this gorgeously constructed and written novel. The other two are Billy Walton, the proprietor of the local bar and sponsor of the T-ball team where Gabriel will begin his protean sports career, and Trey Beathard, a disgraced college football coach who takes over the local high school program and becomes one of Gabriel’s mentors. Each of them has a unique voice; Hannah’s is particularly beautiful and captivating: “Each morning since my baptism at age seventeen I have awakened from the soft death of sleep, and my first thought, always, has been: Lord, Thy will be done. I do not say it for my own credit. It has not been easy.” And it’s only going to get harder as her grandson Gabriel’s life unfolds. Gabriel himself is a mythic creation: Suckled on goat milk, he has a profound bond with animals, and his legend grows as quickly as he does, reaching a size of almost 9 feet and 600 pounds. Rindo’s writing about animals and nature, about Amish faith, about art and sports—including pro wrestling!—is extraordinary. At the heart of his concerns is the battle between good and evil as expressed in human kindness and human weakness, embodied in unforgettable characters.
With its profound portraits of both Amish and secular characters and their luminously real community, this is a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781250375339
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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