A cozy cup of chai for the soul.
An intergenerational tale of self-discovery and the relationships that matter most.
Cullie Desai, a 25-year-old Indian American woman, is endlessly loyal to her mother, Alisha (known as Aly), and her paternal grandmother, Bindu. So when Cullie gets a call that Bindu is in distress, she immediately hops on a plane to Florida from her home in San Francisco and shows up at her grandmother’s new condo at a glitzy retirement center. A loving familial gesture—except that in this case, the older woman’s distress is the result of a really bad date, when the man she's with dies in the middle of their first sexual interlude. This sets the tone for the novel as a whole: It's the story of three women bound by deep love and very few boundaries. While Bindu’s sexual drama does drive a chunk of the plot, the three deal with a whole host of problems, supporting each other with advice, chai, and lavish home-cooked meals. Tech-genius Cullie needs to develop a new state-of-the-art app while opening herself up to the possibility of love. Recent divorcée Aly is trying to prove her worth at work while dealing with a surprise visit from Ashish, her ex-husband (and Bindu’s son). And Bindu is balancing her desire to be liberated in her golden years with traumatic memories that she cannot shut out. Told from the alternating perspectives of Cullie, Aly, and Bindu, the novel often relies on overly coincidental plot points and too-convenient characters. That said, these problems are offset by Dev’s success at portraying the profound bonds of care, humor, and love that run among the three women: “Love so strong it was almost painful tightened around Bindu’s heart for these two. The world would never see them like this, entirely comfortable in their skin. This was a world they had created, the three of them, because of who they were.”
A cozy cup of chai for the soul.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6625-0926-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mindy's Book Studio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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