A haunting tale of adolescent art, desire, and lingering wounds.
In Strohmeier’s novella, a musical young woman competes for lovers and grapples with desire in Vienna.
In this compact, quietly feverish narrative, the author dissects the humiliations and ecstasies of early desire with a musician’s ear for rhythm. The unnamed narrator, a sardonic young woman studying at a high school for gifted musicians, charts her rivalry with Joachim, a preternaturally self-assured baritone who collects girlfriends. When they both fall for the same girl, the enigmatic Lea, their contest mutates into something stranger—a duet of obsession, envy, and self-discovery. (The narrator later yearns for Stasi, an older opera singer who is an authority figure and mentor.) Strohmeier’s prose swings between wry precision and operatic excess (“the Vile Monk is so obviously a metaphor… a psychological abstraction of your lesbian feelings”). The author finds pathos in adolescent melodrama and humor in the lofty seriousness of its young artists—a legend about students who accidentally summon the ghost of a lovelorn monk plays like a distorted echo of the main story. The Vienna setting is vividly rendered with trams, convent walls, and café smoke, providing a stage for the narrator’s conflicting impulses regarding solitude and surrender. Beneath the wit and gossip in the dialogue runs a genuine ache: the longing to dissolve into art, another person, or both. The author resists depicting tidy queer awakenings; her narrator’s desires arrive as complications tangled with rivalry, mimicry, and envy for what others have bound up with resentment. Strohmeier’s voice is sharp-edged and unsentimental, recalling the precision of Garth Greenwell and the sardonic intimacy of Chris Kraus. The story feels less like a coming-out narrative than an aria of thwarted hunger, its beauty resting in a note that won’t resolve.
A haunting tale of adolescent art, desire, and lingering wounds.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798992025842
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Joyland Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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