An uneven but ultimately worthwhile story of personal growth.
A middle-aged TV producer returns to her ancestral home off the coast of Italy and confronts a trauma from her youth in De Palma’s novel.
Anna has been working on a reality show called Bride-to-Be for several seasons, but the program’s struggles are escalating. When plans to film the finale in a beautiful vacation spot get derailed by an earthquake, Anna’s well-intentioned but meddling assistant, Cheryl, convinces the team they should move the shoot to Anna’s deceased aunt’s home on the idyllic Italian island of Ischia. Though Anna is adamantly opposed, her team is excited by the optics, and before she knows what’s hit her, she’s nine times zones away from her California home on a hydrofoil to Ischia. The narrative then flashes back to 1984, when teenage Anna spent a fateful summer as her aunt’s ward on the island. It’s clear something terrible happened that summer, but adult Anna wants to avoid those memories at all costs. As the story alternates between past and present, Anna struggles to save Bride-to-Be while also confronting the difficult losses and revelations she faced in her youth. In this well-paced, plot-driven novel, the narrative’s greatest strength lies in its lush and evocative descriptions of Ischia—readers will be able to taste the garlic in the air and feel the pebbly sand between their toes (“At a café, we pass a group of men arguing about politics. Mostly, the corso is filled with women out buying the fresh meat, cheese and pasta they will use for the pranzo, the midday meal”). Anna is well developed and full of complex, layered emotions; she shines brightest in the chapters detailing her youth. The present-day timeline feels like part of a different, more topical story, with its frazzled Hollywood TV execs, annoying logistical issues, and overly aggressive groom. While the flashbacks are full of ripe emotions, the modern-day scenes leave genuine sentiments fighting for space on the page. Similarly, the TV-production problems receive disproportionate attention, serving mainly as a distraction from the more compelling examination of Anna’s attempts to reconcile her unsatisfying present with difficult moments from her past. Even so, the author deftly tackles complex issues ranging from self-discovery and loss to identity-building and healing.
An uneven but ultimately worthwhile story of personal growth.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781941637920
Page Count: 268
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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