Strong ingredients, but as with the dessert at the elegant rehearsal dinner, something is off.
In the 1970s, a wedding weekend on a small Virginia island is filled with tension.
In her sophomore novel, Beaird combines a rich boy/poor girl marriage plot with a historical fiction–type depiction of Synanon, a drug rehab program turned cult that employed methods known as “attack therapy.” It’s an uneasy merger. The wedding is being held on a small island where the groom’s wealthy family, the Pruitts, is uniformly disliked by the locals who serve them. Andrew Pruitt’s fiancée, Shay O’Connor, has received a warmer reception—but though she is one of three point-of-view characters, the reader can really only assume it’s because she’s not a rich snob. She remains a cipher; chapters detailing her Synanon experiences feel tacked on and the notion that unsavory characters from the group have been sent to the island to disrupt the wedding, possibly with violence, never gains credibility. The other two narrative perspectives belong to her brother, William, and her college classmate Joel; readers may find themselves repeatedly having to recall which is which. Brother William starts the action by going to pick up his Aunt Eleanor, who is supposed to travel to the wedding with him but is dead in her reading chair when he arrives at her apartment. He makes the strange decision to conceal her death from his mother and Shay; an envelope addressed to Shay, which he finds on the kitchen table, remains undelivered until the end of the book, and what the contents are supposed to mean are as confusing as another key aspect of the ending. This second late-breaking question mark is in the plotline revolving around Joel. Poor Joel is dumped midweekend by his wedding date when she realizes he is, and has always been, in love with Shay. Shay’s handling of both her two-man complications and her Synanon pursuers provides multiple surprising, high-drama plot points. Does her somewhat wimpy exterior conceal the soul of a ruthless antiheroine? The answer is a definite maybe.
Strong ingredients, but as with the dessert at the elegant rehearsal dinner, something is off.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250386694
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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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