An upbeat love story that’s hampered by uneven characterization.
In Elliott’s novel, a 50-something divorced woman moves from the Midwest to small-town California and finds community, spiritual purpose, and queer romance.
For the Rev. Grace Callahan, life in suburban Detroit feels increasingly meaningless. The recently divorced 53-year-old is living alone in a home filled with memories of her ex-husband and two children, who have since moved out. While flipping through a real estate magazine, she sees—and later submits an offer for—a $1 million adobe house in Ojai, California. Soon, she upends her life and moves from Detroit to the picturesque West Coast. The narrative charts her first year in the Golden State as she renovates the crumbling house and tends to 10 acres of citrus and avocado groves with the help of a contractor, housekeeper, and two master gardeners. (For the most part, the author sidesteps questions of money and Grace’s seemingly endless supply of it.) Challenges arise, such as a broken water line and an earthquake, but Grace approaches life optimistically, with an almost ministerial outlook: “More than just bricks and mortar, the house seemed to be a metaphor of sorts for her own life, ripe for reinvention and rebirth.” Perhaps her biggest reinvention is romantic: Grace falls forJane Anne Thomas, who cares for the property’s multiple animals. Elliott succeeds in crafting Grace as a multidimensional protagonist. The portrayals of the Ojai characters, though—particularly Jane Anne and contractor Emilio Martinez—lack the same nuance; they’re presented as unrealistically calm and forgiving to Grace, who ultimately finds a new spiritual, romantic, and physical home on the West Coast. When the protagonist experiences overwhelming emotions, which is often, she and the third-person narration sometimes lean on cliches to express them (“people greeted her by name as she passed, and her heart overflowed with happiness”), which makes the sweet story feel saccharine at times.
An upbeat love story that’s hampered by uneven characterization.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798896361428
Page Count: 248
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 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
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