An entertaining and thoughtful satire.
Green’s novel takes a humorous look at life inside a Nevada Air Force base, where members of the U.S. military fly attack drones.
The author uses his own experience piloting drones for the U.S. Air Force to depict the misadventures of drone operators at the fictional Cathcart Air Force Base in 2014. Capt. Charlie Young asks to be transferred to a reconnaissance unit, as he’s uninterested in killing and hoping for an eventual return to flying real-world planes. His unrelentingly enthusiastic squadron commander, Lt. Col. Clutterbuck, agrees to the transfer on the condition that Young first participates in a drone strike, convinced that it will change his mind. Meanwhile, buffoonish Capt. Harding is obsessed with killing as many “terrorist bastards” as he possibly can; award-chasing Capt. William Augustus Barrington IV accidentally pops out his own eyeball with a key while saluting; Doc Reeling attributes every ailment, no matter the symptoms, to his paranoid belief in the spread of a mysterious head cold; Maj. Mancuso, an undercover operative from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, clumsily tries to expose nonexistent drug use; and all are beset by illegal overhead drone activity and antiwar protestors. Green’s tale, told in sharp prose, is structured more as a series of amusing vignettes than as a traditional, plot-driven novel, but it offers some poignant observations on the realities of military life along the way. After one protestor dies in the heat, for example, Green notes the following: “Since nobody knew the protester’s name or anything about him—like that he was a husband and a father and a veteran who had been drafted into the same war and dodged the same bullets and humped over the same jungle hills as the motorcycle-driving veterans who protested his protest—it was easy for the pilots and sensor operators of the Sixty-Seventh Reconnaissance Squadron to forget that he existed.”
An entertaining and thoughtful satire.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9798995267119
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 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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