Intriguing, with a surprising, tender twist.
Johns’ novel chronicles the rise, falls, and redemption of a high school football player from a small town in northeastern Tennessee.
James (“Jimbo”) Cooper Winslow, born in 1971 in Elizabethton, Tennessee, celebrates his 9th birthday at a movie theater and waits for his mother, Sheena, to pick him up. She never arrives. He walks the three miles to get home, alone and frightened that something terrible must have happened to his mom for her to have forgotten about him. Inside the house, he finds her on the kitchen table, lying drunk and naked under the hardware store man, Mr. Chambers. Chaos ensues. After Chambers leaves, Sheena whispers to Jimbo: “Nobody’s gonna give you nothing in this life…You gotta go get it for yourself, no matter who you hurt to do it. Including me.” Although he rejects the concept, it becomes a recurring mantra in his life. As a high school senior, he heads out for a tour of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he’s been offered a football scholarship. Unfortunately, Sheena insists on accompanying him, which leads to a confrontation that dashes all his hopes. But Jimbo still has a chance: Through Sheena’s old high school friend, coach Steve Watts, Jimbo secures a scholarship at Wake Forest, where he becomes a wide receiver—but just as he scores his greatest victory, he suffers a devastating injury. Johns himself was a wide receiver for Wake Forest, and his detailed descriptions of the action on the football field are lucid and exciting enough to engage even those readers who aren’t overly familiar with the intricacies of play. Jimbo’s story unspools through first-person narration and edgy dialogue. As he navigates the 11 years he spends away from his hometown chasing his dreams—first for football glory and then for Hollywood fame—he plays out his mother’s cynical and fateful prophesy. The Hollywood years, fueled by ambition and fraught with failure, are occasionally funny, but more often they’re poignantly emotional, effectively conveying the pain of struggling against impossible odds.
Intriguing, with a surprising, tender twist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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