A well-researched and compelling homage to Cervantes’ Dulcinea.
A feminist reclamation of Don Quixote’s Dulcinea that explores what happens when the woman who inspired the character is able to confront the writer.
Dolça Llull Prat is the daughter of a wealthy merchant. She’s confident, enjoys reading and painting, and, as her father says, “her curiosity is matched only by her impetuosity, and both are as long as a sennight of ceaseless rain.” She is multidimensional, unlike Don Quixote’s Dulcinea. The book opens with the arrival of distant relative Miguel de Cerbantes de Cortinas at Dolça’s family home in Barcelona. Upon meeting, Dolça and Miguel are immediately attracted to one another, and they begin a secret romance. Dolça prefers to read and speak in Catalan, so she calls him Miquel, because, she says, “that’s what it is in my tongue.” The plot and setting are firmly anchored with excellent historical details, and author Veciana-Suarez takes particular care to ensure the prominent languages in Spain at the time are well represented. Miquel the “poet-soldier” is not a man of Dolça’s status, so her parents disapprove of him—but this doesn’t dissuade Dolça. Miquel visits and writes often, until he abruptly stops. In his absence, Dolça’s parents arrange a marriage to Françesc d’Oms Calders, who they feel can provide the life to which she’s accustomed. Before the wedding takes place, however, Dolça receives news that Miquel was taken hostage, which explains his disappearance. She feels conflicted but goes ahead with the marriage anyway. When Miquel is released, they continue their affair despite the fact that she’s married. Years later, Miquel, who writes under the name Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, publishes El Quixote, which includes a character named Dulcinea. The character’s description is unflattering, and the closeness to her name causes rumors about his and Dolça’s relationship to flourish. Dolça feels betrayed. Dulcinea, “the hidalgo’s muse,” inspires everything the title character does, which Miquel feels is a compliment. Chapters alternate between Dolça's page-turning memories in the late 1500s, following her romance with Miquel and their falling-out, with more slowly moving chapters set in the early 1600s as she travels to see him one last time.
A well-researched and compelling homage to Cervantes’ Dulcinea.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798200813414
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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