A bright, fresh book that is best enjoyed with a record playing in the background and a cat on the reader’s lap.
A tale of love, longing, and the culture that both confines and liberates us—narrated by a cat.
The narrator of this slender novel is the epitome of cat. In her long life she has known the love of her mother in a perfect spot beneath an old tool shed, has loved her own kittens in a less ideal location beneath a coffee shop, and has cycled through the lives of several humans and ended up with her own true human love, a handsome, cultured shoe salesman she refers to as the Mustache. She and the Mustache have a life driven by quiet joys. They listen to Coltrane and Son House, absorb audiobooks while the Mustache cooks dinner, appreciate a wide range of poetic verse, and spend Sundays together filled with “love and stillness.” Then, one day, the Mustache goes on a trip and leaves our narrator in the care of a neighbor boy who, in spite of his seemingly kind nature, kidnaps the cat and sells her to “some guy in a tacky trench coat,” who delivers her to a laboratory. There, as part of a 10-day course designed to “improve emotional competency,” our narrator is sealed inside a literal version of Schrödinger’s box—a mirror-lined container, devoid of food and water, wherein she is theoretically both alive and dead as long as the box remains unopened. For the cat, however, her life and death are anything but theory and, as the novel examines her life before the box and in its unusual aftermath, the joyous images of this cat’s most catlike experiences cast a dappled spotlight on the human world, too. Inventive, erudite, funny, and devastating, this debut novel by memoirist and poet Morín eschews traditional plot in favor of the illuminating power of the image. While this may result in a frustrating experience for readers with a literal expectation of what a novel must do, this book’s effervescent energy has its own pleasures, which more than make up for any holes in the plot.
A bright, fresh book that is best enjoyed with a record playing in the background and a cat on the reader’s lap.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9780593702048
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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