A sharp-witted, topical novel.
In Greason’s debut novel, three spurned women hatch a plan to destroy the man who hurt them.
At the advice of her Overeaters Anonymous sponsor, Dani Smith has taken to journaling about her negative feelings regarding the dissolution of her marriage. When she does, she finds that her entries portray her unfaithful rock-star ex-husband, Peter, dying in various painful or embarrassing ways. “Each morning, Dani awoke, heart fluttering, eager to stab, shoot, or poison Peter. She filled the blank pages of journals with the flames of her revenge fantasies until they caught fire and exploded into her blog, ‘Just Deserts,’ with (currently) sixty-one avid followers @just-deserts.” As Dani’s posts get more extreme, they garner more attention, including from other women who have known the pain of loving Peter. Red dated Peter in college before he left her suddenly for another woman—and then began a new relationship with him 20 years later that ended after only a few weeks when she learned she was pregnant and he was married. (Humiliated, Red terminated the pregnancy.) Red finds “Just Deserts” so cathartic that she seeks out Dani—who has just had her troubled 13-year-old niece thrust upon her—and befriends her. She’s impressed by Dani’s sick imagination, but she doesn’t want to waste it on blogs: She wants to destroy Peter’s life for real. The key to doing so may be Sasha, Peter’s current wife and former backup singer. Sasha is pregnant with twins, though she lives in fear that her husband will leave her for her tour replacement. Can these three women find common cause and bring down a guy who has broken hearts all over Los Angeles? To do so, they’ll first have to help one another rebuild their self-esteem.
Greason’s prose is precise and darkly comic, particularly the excerpts from Dani’s blog, which form their own short chapters. For legal reasons, Dani always refers to Peter as Steve, as here, where she fantasizes about poisoning a birthday meal: “Steve went into the bedroom and shut the door. I tiptoed after, listening for a moment to his soft whispers on the other side, and then I went into the kitchen, pulled the Drano out from under the sink, and stirred it slowly into the bubbling red sauce in the pot on the stove.” Though the premise is not entirely original, Greason pushes the plot deep into #MeToo territory in a way that gives it unexpected emotional heft. The characters, though heightened, are complex and believable, and the relationships that develop among Dani, Red, and Sasha—who have all served as “the other woman” in one another’s lives—are engrossing. The novel’s end is right out of one of Dani’s blog posts, and there’s a neatness to it all that doesn’t often happen in real-life #MeToo cases, but Greason keeps the book on the fine line between realism and farce. The result makes for a satisfying read that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
A sharp-witted, topical novel.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956851-12-0
Page Count: 382
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2022
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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