Smart, fun, staunchly feminist entertainment.
Stewart’s popular series takes an epistolary turn as the Kopp sisters chronicle their separate World War I adventures via letters.
This requires some authorial contrivance. Norma, established as a woman of few words in the previous five volumes, has to have her terse missives supplemented by the chatty epistles of her friend Aggie, a nurse at the American hospital in France where Norma is battling military indifference to her cherished pigeon messenger program. Fleurette’s escapades in the chorus of a revue performing for troops in U.S. Army camps are recounted mostly to a nonjudgmental friend rather than her anxious older sisters. And Constance’s reports on tracking down spies are so improbably novelistic that Stewart feels obliged to have her justify them as ways “to better paint a picture” for her superior at the Bureau of Investigation. Readers will not mind a bit, as the series returns to top form after a spell of doldrums in Kopp Sisters on the March (2019). Two mysteries drive the plot: An unjust accusation that Aggie is stealing hospital supplies launches Norma into an investigation that ultimately nabs a German agent; and Constance tracks down a ring of saboteurs in New Jersey with the help of Fleurette, who has done some growing up on tour while caring for a green parrot entrusted to her by a soldier heading overseas. As always, the feisty sisters refuse to be daunted by men who doubt their abilities or, in Fleurette’s case, the ladies of the Committee on Protective Work for Girls who are sure that young women’s interactions with soldiers “weaken their morals and inflict upon them crippling social diseases.” The censorious committee really existed, as did the Army’s pigeon program, but Stewart acknowledges in her endnotes that she has invented more of the Kopps’ activities than usual due to a lack of information about their WWI years. No matter: The fictional opportunities she dangles for her three feisty protagonists at the novel’s close will leave readers eager for the next installment.
Smart, fun, staunchly feminist entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-09312-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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