A romantic yet historically evocative depiction of two pioneering women’s intertwined lives.
In 1926, at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, a young nurse sacrifices her career and later the love of her life to save a premature baby who will become her daughter.
“To qualify as a nurse, I must master it all,” Althea Anderson reflects of her profession’s scientific requirements. “But to serve as one, I must pretend I know none of it.” In 1926, in a male-dominated obstetrics ward, she sees premature babies, their parents typically poor, consigned to die because, as one doctor says, “It is not our place to question God’s plan,” even though a doctor in Coney Island is saving such infants daily by putting them in incubators...and displaying them as a sideshow to fund his initiative. Haunted by one child’s death in particular, Althea smuggles another newborn, who weighs a little over 2 pounds, out of the hospital and places her in the admirable care of Dr. Couney at Luna Park. “Live babies!” the barker tells the boardwalk crowd. “All the world loves a baby!” Inside, however, all is calm and competence, and Margaret thrives. And Althea’s life, already altered by a single act of mercy, becomes one of secrecy and sacrifice. “Love makes us do things we would not otherwise consider,” one character observes, and though the novel occasionally strays into such sentimental clichés, Althea remains an engaging and convincing heroine. As does Stella Wright, the novel’s other narrator. A young special education teacher in 1950, Stella confronts that era’s brand of male callousness and societal bigotry with its undercurrents of eugenics and racism. Still mourning her recently deceased mother and disturbed by her husband’s wartime PTSD, Stella is drawn back into her mother’s past, where true identities and destinies are deftly revealed. “She made me who I am,” Stella realizes, “and I need her help to figure out who I can become....”
A romantic yet historically evocative depiction of two pioneering women’s intertwined lives.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32804-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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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