A debut that’s as sweet as the Junior Mints at your favorite movie theater.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before meets Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda in this breezy LGBTQ+ romance.
For movie buff Wren Roland, the perfect kiss-before-the-credits scene has a foolproof formula: the right place, the right moment, and the right person. Unlike his sociable best friends, Avery and Mateo, the 22-year-old recent college graduate has never been kissed. Aside from plenty of on-screen kissing lessons from Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, the closest Wren’s lips have come to another boy’s amounts to a series of four “Pre-Coming-Out-Almost-Kisses,” the memories of which he preserves safely in an email folder labeled “Tentacle Porn.” Instead of wallowing in what could have been, Wren looks forward to his eighth summer in a row working at Wiley’s Drive-In, a historical gem in his hometown of Willow Valley, Pennsylvania. As the new manager, Wren plans to help his boss, Earl, keep the establishment afloat by tracking down reclusive local movie director Alice Kelly for a special showing of her one and only film, which hasn't been seen in years. Then a drunken email fiasco disrupts Wren’s well-planned summer when he accidentally sends out the four letters he wrote to his almost-kisses, including Derick Haverford, his high school best friend, who ghosted him. As luck would have it, Derick is returning to Willow Valley as Wiley’s social media marketing intern. Thrown together in an attempt to save the drive-in and Alice Kelly’s directorial reputation, Wren comes to learn that maybe the real thing is even better than the movies. While Janovsky’s debut is slightly predictable and many of the characters are prone to over-the-top dramatics, there’s a light, airy feeling to the book that’s not unlike watching your favorite comfort film. Wren’s personal qualms prove relatable and sincere, as when he struggles to define himself as anything other than queer until realizing he’s demisexual, and readers will enjoy accompanying him on his early-20s journey.
A debut that’s as sweet as the Junior Mints at your favorite movie theater.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72825-058-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
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
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