The dark humor suggests Boyle is having more fun than his characters.
A romantic triangle turns brutal in a dead-end Nevada desert town.
It all starts with the death of Terrence Tully’s mother. He’s a third-year medical resident in Los Angeles, working a brain-deadening schedule and barely aware of the world outside. He reduces the rest of humanity to symptoms and diagnoses. But the news of his mother’s death changes his life, and not for the better. He drives the four hours across the desert to deal with her affairs in Nevada. She’s left him a house. And a dog. He stops to get his bearings at a restaurant in town, where he encounters Bethany. She’s pretty, approachable, and apparently needs a place to live. He now has one, his mother’s house, though he isn’t about to open it to a stranger. But Bethany awakens something irresistibly sexual in Terry, and the house is soon all but hers. She’s recently experienced a hard breakup with Jesse, a biker with a jealous streak and impulse-control issues who teaches eighth grade. (You wouldn’t want him teaching your eighth grader.) It’s soon apparent that Bethany’s ex isn’t quite as much an ex as she’d indicated. Something’s gotta give. Something does, and then something worse. Revenge, retribution, retaliation—there are a series of attempts to balance the cosmic scales of justice. Do these characters get what they deserve? (Does anyone?) The narrative alternates among the perspective of each of these three, none of whom has much of an interior life. The plot pivots on pat coincidence, with some noirish cliché and riffing on sex and death. Each of the three characters wonders where their life is going. Though doctors tend to warn patients they’re not out of the woods, Bethany realizes that “we’re all in the woods all the time.” By the end of the novel, it’s plain that there is no possibility of redemption for these three, or even resolution.
The dark humor suggests Boyle is having more fun than his characters.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781324097525
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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