An ambitious, layered novel with many compelling narrative threads.
Trapped in a coma, billionaire Steven Benjamin Levinson reflects on his life choices.
A fishing accident lands Steven Levinson comatose in a San Francisco hospital. Now his daughters—Genevieve, Regina, and Coraline—are colluding against him and one another while his son, Danny, serves in the armed forces. His daughters want his oil fortune—the one that Steven denied Danny so he’d be forced to earn his own living. Trapped in his own mind, Steven observes the drama of his family and of the hospital staff working around him. He also reckons with his own past and morality, including his decision to use his billions to support the continued U.S. invasion of the Middle East. Meanwhile, in the hospital, there is infighting between Dr. Glower’s two sons, Ed and Ted, over their father’s will. In Steven’s reminiscences, he recalls serving in Vietnam and his relationship with a woman named Camille Le. He’d asked her to marry him, but she died in crossfire soon after the proposal. The billionaire’s memories jump forward in time and land on an investigation into a murder his father may have committed. After being confronted by a man who threatened to kill him “the same way your father killed ours,” Steven searched through town records and came to learn that his father shot both an attacking brown bear and a man named Mr. Bugaev. The killing was deemed an accident, but it had devastating consequences for Mr. Bugaev’s children, who were placed into foster care. Steven’s father, meanwhile, ended up with a fortune of millions of dollars. Steven later was the victim of a bear attack of his own, also shooting the bear. In the hospital, meanwhile, his family and doctors attempt to wake him up. As the line between truth and imagination begins to blur, Steven continues to weigh all of his big choices.
Pauzauskie’s novel is carefully framed around Shakespeare’s King Lear. Family members gathered around their comatose patriarch in the hospital live out the trials of the play’s characters —Genevieve, Regina, and Coraline fighting to curry favor with their dad—while Steven, of course, takes on the role of King Lear. Lia—his wife—goes so far as to say that “he was always obsessed with a Shakespeare play… the one with the old king.” Steven’s comatose state is the perfect vehicle for the protagonist’s extended reminiscences, though more could be done to link these with his moral journey. Experimental stretches, in which sentences become fragmentary and nonsensical, provide an interesting perspective on the effects of his condition on his mental faculties and unreliability as a narrator. While the novel is, for the most part, written in clear and concise first-person prose, Steven’s mental lapses bring the accuracy of his observations into question, especially as those at his bedside debate whether he can hear them. The payoff to this limited perspective comes in the story’s surprise ending, though it’s regrettably too rushed to feel fully satisfying.
An ambitious, layered novel with many compelling narrative threads.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781962931311
Page Count: 236
Publisher: High Frequency Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
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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