An emotionally affecting story with excellent prose.
A man with an intellectual disability accidentally kills his neighbor in Frances’ novel.
Fortunato Bonaventura—known around his Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens as “Helper”—was a “certified genius” as a boy, but he fell into a coma following a nasty fall. This left him with developmental disabilities, but his affinity for color and music shines through. Now middle-aged, Helper does odd jobs around Carroll Gardens. While tackling a task for his neighbor, Mary Pat, a misunderstanding results in Helper accidentally killing her. Afraid, and lacking the ability to process this event, Helper cleans up the scene and returns home. After the body is discovered, Tony, Helper’s nephew, is assigned as the detective on the case, though he has “been criticized at times for being too sympathetic to perpetrators.” Meanwhile, Helper’s older brother, Gino, has been dating a man named Lee for 6 years but is still closeted in the old neighborhood. Gino confesses to Lee that he caused Helper’s childhood fall as a result of his jealousy and resentment regarding his brother and the attention he received from their parents. Helper eventually begins therapy as Tony gets closer to the truth of Mary Pat’s death. Though a killing propels Frances’ tale, this is a story of healing. The three leads (Helper, Gino, and Tony) are all haunted by their adolescences and take great strides to change course—as a result, the accidental murder plot feels almost incongruous with the rest of the story. The author’s prose is excellent, though, particularly when Frances describes Helper’s inner state: “Inside Helper, the bubbles have slown down and turned into something like golden honey, heavy and slithery.” But Tony, who suffers from self-loathing and seesaws between how he was raised and the man he wants to be, is perhaps the standout character. Frances deftly navigates a traumatic narrative while portraying the charms of Carroll Gardens and the personalities who inhabit it.
An emotionally affecting story with excellent prose.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798891328303
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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