An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.
When Leisl Davis begins her first year at Smith College, she gets a spot in a competitive seminar on the history of witchcraft that turns out to be more practical than she could have ever imagined.
Leisl isn’t doing so well when she moves into her dorm at Smith. She battles with suicidal tendencies and self-loathing and is trying desperately to convince herself that she isn’t attracted to girls. She meets a friendly, handsome Amherst student named Tripp, but when he rapes her, she is denied support or even validation from school or the authorities. Leisl befriends Luna, another of Tripp’s victims, and immediately feels an attraction. They sign up for a seminar led by the enigmatic professor Sienna Weiss, who whittles the course down to Liesl, Luna, and two other girls, Gabi and Charlotte. Sienna reveals to the students that they are not a class, they are a coven, and under her guidance they learn how to perform real magic. They progress quickly, but their bond is complicated when Luna and Gabi start dating and Leisl cannot contain her jealousy, nor her untreated PTSD. When the coven learns that Tripp and his Amherst frat buddies have somehow developed magical powers of their own, Leisl drives the coven to take justice into their own hands. This debut is a bit rough around the edges but is often quite brilliant, particularly when Leisl reflects on the ways women and girls are demonized simply for protecting themselves: “might you see that, in order to be safe in houses of God, much less the untamed wild of streets and bars, we must grow snakes from our scalps and learn to turn men to stone—just to go outside?” Harlowe writes Leisl’s point of view in rushing, furious sentences, depicting her increasingly fraught mental state while also leaving room for friendship, love, and healing in the slightly uneven ending.
An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5220-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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