Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read.
Ten lurid stories of magic, metamorphosis, and real-world longing.
In the title story of this debut collection, a woman is haunted by a more-or-less friendly ghost who will not stop encouraging her to kill herself. The ghost is ruining her love life and interfering with her day-to-day activities, yet, rather than exorcise it, the woman embraces it, mulling over the pleasure she takes in the sensations of her body in contrast with what the ghost has to offer: death as calm and quiet, as “the longest lie-in on a day where no one is coming to visit and there is nowhere else to be.” In “Next to Cleanliness,” Catherine goes to a doctor for a cleanse. She assumes she is in for “a week of celery juice,” but is instead treated to an escalating series of witch-doctor tonics that strip her down to her literal skeleton. When the frustrated doctor proposes a final-straw treatment—an “extraction” to remove “something toxic built into [Catherine’s] system”—Catherine must decide how much of herself she is willing to lose for the elusive promise of happiness. And in the exuberantly disgusting “Squirm,” Laura cares for her father, who has somehow transformed into a giant tape worm. Torn between a desire to escape her filial duties and a sincere tenderness for her father, Laura hovers in a state of limbo where it seems her best option might just be to sink into the compost next to Dad. The main characters of these strange tales are universally mired in unsatisfying romances, careers, or caretaking relationships. Yet, instead of reorienting their lives toward self-actualization, as our pop psychology–obsessed culture would recommend, they often choose to lean into their situations, transforming their literal selves into more of whatever it is one might fairly assume they would seek to escape. In these unflinching stories, Keating builds a macabre world in which her characters are utterly free even within their various compulsions, constraints, and grotesque circumstances.
Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668061503
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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