A comedy of errors that gets it just right.
A young woman comes into her own amid the chaos of the literary workplace and the mysteries of the LSAT.
Coll enthusiasts will remember sweet Clemi, a clerk in the Washington, D.C., bookstore that’s the setting for Bookish People (2022). The daughter of a powerful literary agent and a famous alcoholic poet whom she met for the first time in that earlier book, 26-year-old Clemi is still trying to figure out her future, having left the bookstore and taken a job at an organization that’s had to change its name to “WLNP: Washington Literary Nonprofit” due to scandals in its past. Her first week at work is so unsettling—her boss disappears; the office is ransacked; a huge cat shows up; the annual prize banquet is days away and the caterer has not been paid, because, uh-oh, the organization’s bank accounts have just been emptied—that she stops by the bookstore to pick up a study guide for the LSAT. A logical reasoning question about clowns spirals into a classic Coll subplot, with clowns turning up around every corner. Like Bookish People, the novel sparkles with kooky details plucked from literary culture. Coll’s naming of characters and titling of their books is a schtick that never gets old, nor does a gleeful running joke about a man who looks exactly like Malcolm Gladwell. Will there be a lost car-key subplot? Of course there will. At the heart of the hijinks is dear, self-effacing Clemi, who keeps getting mistaken for somebody’s nanny, most currently the 8-year-old genius son of this year’s prizewinner. Though the boy is notorious for having caused $52,000 worth of damage at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, he will prove to be another example of Coll’s ability to find redemptive qualities in even the most obnoxious characters—a key gift for this chronicler of the egomania, foolishness, and undimmed aspirations of the modern literati.
A comedy of errors that gets it just right.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781400346653
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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
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