A charming, heartfelt story that proves you’re never too old to fall in love.
A retired man and woman connect in Pugh’s adventure-filled tale of romance.
When 65-year-old Beth St. Clair retires from teaching after 42 years, she celebrates by painting her condo. After it’s done, she has a quiet dinner with her friend and ends up having a heart attack. This leads Beth to cardiac rehab, where she meets 69-year-old Michael Bartoli. His wife died the year before, after he watched her mind deteriorate for 10 years. A few days later, Michael had a cardiac event; now he’s staying with his daughter in Centerburg, Illinois, and wondering how to return to his old self. Beth has lived in this town her whole life, but Michael left behind a house in Des Plaines and doesn’t know what remains for him there. When the two start to connect after a misunderstanding, it sets off a blossoming love story that continually switches between the couple’s first-personperspectives. The novel’s first half follows the growing relationship between Beth and Michael and the adventures they experience together, including trips to meet each other’s families—one of which involves a terrifying plane ride. The second half starts as they settle more comfortably into each other’s lives and figure out what their futures will look like. Although Pugh’s narrative doesn’t have a lot of forward momentum, the quiet and realistic romance works well to pull readers in. The story breathes life into every character from the local town gossip to the server at the North Star Family Restaurant. Pugh also imbues the world with color, as when a woman in a crowd is described as “a red silk suit bobbing in a sea of muted herringbones.” The author does sometimes let the narration wander off, which can slow the pace, but Beth and Michael are strong enough characters to keep it from drifting too far.
A charming, heartfelt story that proves you’re never too old to fall in love.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798987070765
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Green Place Books
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
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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