A stunning collection of short fiction set in the American Southwest.
Compelling stories explore hard lives and hope in a landscape as dangerous as it is enchanting.
Most of the pieces in Hicks’ debut collection are told from the points of view of girls or young women; all share a Southwestern setting and convey the authenticity of felt experience. Grief and loss are recurring themes (“Carriage” details the loss of a pregnancy); transformation is another (in “Rock Collection,” tokens of memory become a protective fortress). A few stories hint at the supernatural (the imagined wolf in “If Only I Could Tell You”), while others, like “My Drugstore Queen” and “Farrago,” highlight fleeting moments of daily life. “Drill,” which is about a school lockdown, and “Extraterrestre,” in which a young girl secretly aids a fugitive immigrant, address up-to-the-minute social issues, and women stand up to violent men in “Cowboy Titanium,” “Little Lady,” and “Pick-Me-Girl.” Flash fiction pieces less than two pages long pack a powerful emotional punch and make up more than half of the collection. Hicks’ writing is as spare and stripped to the essentials as the desert her stories inhabit. One brief piece, “There Is No Advice I’d Give My 16-Year-Old Self,” is almost a prose poem. In the title entry, a mother tells her daughter, “We should howl and get lost and find ourselves again and again.” Despite their brevity, the stories are packed with biting social commentary (in one of the longer stories, rivalry between a pair of fake cowboys in a “Wild West” theme park leads to tragedy), distinctive characters (tough-talking Clementine and sweet Dally take a Thelma and Louise–style joyride to the Grand Canyon in “Rattlesnakes”), and vivid imagery: In “Blink,” a school bus driver “would pick us up and drop us off like he was in the sanitation business”; a girl engaged in a staring contest sees “the pasture, the cows, the rolling hills beyond, and all the blue above” reflected in her opponent’s dark eyes.
A stunning collection of short fiction set in the American Southwest.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798902431763
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Cowboy Jamboree Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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