A war tale that delivers an impressive blend of historical research and narrative drama.
A rising baseball star volunteers to serve overseas in World War II and later struggles to bear the weight of what he witnessed in this novel.
Professional baseball star Will Jamison is an unsolved mystery, a historical enigma. A talented up-and-coming player for the Washington Senators, he’s “on top of his game, with money, fame, women.” Then, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlists in the Army despite being given ample opportunity and the promise of a considerable payoff from the Senators’ owner, Clark Griffith, to continue to play. In fact, even once he’s a soldier, Will is offered a chance to avoid the perils of combat and play ball for the 84th Infantry Division. Yet again, he eschews the easy way out and chooses to become an anonymous soldier, a “common infantryman.” He distinguishes himself in war, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earning a Silver Star. When he returns to the United States, he rejoins the Senators, and only a month into the season, his skills beginning to regain their former luster, unceremoniously quits, subsequently vanishing forever from the public eye. Kutler suspensefully unravels the puzzle that is Will’s life and the burdensome emotional pain he shoulders in the aftermath of the war.
While the author’s book is fictional, the rigorous historical research he must have done to achieve such an impressive sense of period authenticity is evident on virtually every page. Kutler vividly portrays the excitement of American baseball, but the best sections of the work are devoted to the depiction of the war and the horrors that were committed in its name. Will’s trauma is powerfully described—forced to helplessly witness unspeakable barbarism, he is forever changed, his experience “etched in his memory for eternity.” The author also gives readers some intelligently conceived insights into Will’s past, especially his “tenuous childhood.” Similarly, his love for Kay Barlow as well as his struggle to reconnect with her following the war are poignantly described: “I love her. He knew because every time he found himself in a shadowy corner since returning from the war, mired in despairing emotions and haunting memories that plagued him since he left Belgium, he thought of her.” Kutler’s prose is consistently lucid, but he can strain a bit laboriously to elicit an emotional response from readers, a tendency that flirts with lachrymose manipulation. For example, the author takes gratuitous pains to demonstrate, in long, drawn-out scenes, Will’s honorable resistance to using his celebrity to avoid military service. In addition, the insertion of a “historical note” further explicating the Battle of the Bulge is more intrusive than clarifying—it has the effect of lifting readers out of the story, suspending a complete literary immersion. Nonetheless, this is an emotionally affecting story, both heart-rending and thrilling, as dramatically captivating as it is historically edifying.
A war tale that delivers an impressive blend of historical research and narrative drama.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Warriors Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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