A sweet and tart story stretched over a quirky frame.
A marriage is tested when one of the husbands is abducted by aliens.
Poor Jesse. One of the first things he says to Norman after their meet-cute—colliding on the bike path in Venice, California—is, “Where you go I go.” But years later, after they’ve moved to Joshua Tree, passed middle age, and are contemplating their cooling marriage, Norman steps into an unexplained beam of light in their yard one night and disappears. Jesse enters a period of grief, but also something stranger, since he has no answers and doesn’t know how to talk to anyone about his unheard-of circumstances—though, interestingly, he doesn’t seem to debate with himself about whether he should even try. There are other, more straightforward kinds of grief in this novel, too. For Jesse, there’s the pain of never having had a father, as well as the sorrow he felt after an adoption attempt with Norman that fell through at the last minute. For Norman’s sister, Lally, there’s grief over a brother who died in an accident when she was 5, and over her own nonexistent motherhood. She wants access to the embryos she helped create for Norman and Jesse, but Jesse is prickly about this request. Well, it’s a Steven Rowley book, so most of the characters are prickly. Other things Rowley does well: quippy one-liners (though occasionally a joke comes out of a minor character’s mouth that sounds more like the author’s voice), tertiary characters who shine, funny party scenes with a mix of offbeat personalities and perfectly timed chaos. Also: detailed place description and a tender, unhurried contemplation of the human condition. Plot and structure aren’t so much his bag. Norman is a particularly tough character to grasp. He is less well formed than many of the other characters and neither his disappearance nor the problems in his marriage feel adequately solved.
A sweet and tart story stretched over a quirky frame.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851494
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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