A fascinating and audacious novel about family, marriage, and a society in flux.
In Pye’s novel, sisters take on a fast-changing world and confront their faltering marriages.
As Melissa Stone sits outside the Richmond City Jail after an overnight stay, she longs for something more in life. While waiting for her husband, Marshall, to pick her up (her participation in a raucous protest resulted in her arrest), Melissa reflects on her fiery passion for social justice—and the lack of passion in her marriage. Meanwhile, in the newly renovated kitchen of a pristine home, Melissa’s sister, Cynthia Powers, discovers that her husband, Bobby, has lost all of their money and that their extravagant lifestyle is coming to an end. The sisters’ deteriorating marriages are set against the backdrop of Richmond, Virginia, in the summer of 2020: George Floyd was murdered just a month before, and protests flood the streets across the country as Confederate monuments come under fire. When Marshall—a Black man fed up with his white wife’s performative activism and the “knotted mess of privileged people taking on eliminating racism”—kicks Melissa out of their home, and Cynthia moves away from Bobby, the estranged sisters find themselves next-door neighbors with no one to turn to but each other. At the same time, their husbands find themselves pitted against one another in a fight for Richmond’s future. Pye’s tale is rich in Richmond’s history from the 1850s to 2020; each twist and turn in the sisters’ stories is marked by the downfall of yet another historical monument, including statues of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. The author impressively limns nearly a dozen perspectives on the chaos and the social justice reckoning of 2020; every character displays distinct and complex angles, including a feisty white woman propelled by adrenaline and anti-racism, a Black man who would much rather study history than make it, and a middle-aged white man torn between justice and the influence of his own powerful and conservative father. Though the story could benefit from more interaction between Cynthia and Melissa, Pye’s novel offers a provocative take on Richmond’s past, present, and future.
A fascinating and audacious novel about family, marriage, and a society in flux.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798888248911
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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