An adept and heart-wrenching rural drama with devastating LGBTQ+ themes.
In this novel, the lives of a mortician, dentist, and retired biology teacher become agonizingly tangled in a small town in Appalachia.
Nathan Ashcraft, Tim Sawyer, and Sarah Lawrence are all outsiders in Wentz Hollow, Kentucky. Nathan, the town’s gay mortician, was born there. But he left not long after Sarah, his well-intentioned high school biology teacher, outed him to his parents, only to return when he is informed his father, Bart, has Alzheimer’s disease. Tim is a dentist from Seattle, a gay man as well, who had all the family support Nathan never did, pursuing rural dentistry to help reduce his student loan debt. The cheerful nature he puts on to hide his discomfort in the Appalachian hollers makes him a friend of Bart’s, despite his dementia, though he finds himself more attracted to Nathan’s boorish brother, Johnny, than the funeral director. Sarah is retired but still lives in Wentz Hollow. Her days as a self-proclaimed “fiercely liberal biology teacher, a free-thinker, an activist” who mixed abortifacients for girls in need are long over. Now, she lives with regrets over how she exposed Nathan and fantasizes that he will somehow find happiness with Steve Malone, his still closeted, now married high school love. Yet when Steve’s stillborn child is brought to the mortuary, Tim’s and Sarah’s secrets will force Nathan to reexamine the past. Eads nails the interconnectivity of small-town dramas like a neighborhood handyman who deftly wields a hammer. The pacing is excellent, doling out the story’s big reveals naturally and often turning moments that initially seem inconsequential, like a stop for coffee or a request for a cheap, ceramic urn, into impactful or heartbreaking scenes. The tale is told nonlinearly from the points of view of all three protagonists, though Sarah’s is in the form of a memoir-turned-letter to Nathan, a clever device that not only fits the character, but also keeps the narration from being complacent or repetitive. There is so much tragedy in the novel—involving family, love, identity, idealism, and more—along with just enough hope, that few readers will be able to keep their tears off the page.
An adept and heart-wrenching rural drama with devastating LGBTQ+ themes.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9781736596494
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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