An engrossing novel that features a memorably strong, vibrant female character.
Sjoholm’s historical saga introduces readers to the ever-adventurous writer Dagny Bergland and her personal odysseys at sea and elsewhere.
At 18, the author’s protagonist, Dagny, marries the much older sea captain Edvard Bergland, and they sail around the world. They end up unofficially adopting young orphan Kjell Fossen in Lima, Peru, before fetching up in Port Townsend, Washington, after Edvard’s ship burns at anchor in San Francisco. Edvard, still almost always at sea, dies while ferrying prospectors to Alaska. Meanwhile, the U.S. government hatches a plan to entice the Sámi, renowned reindeer herders from the far north of Norway, to deliver 500 reindeer to eventually serve as food for starving gold miners. What the book eventually depicts is the tragic, wide-scale disruption of cultures against the backdrop of the 1898 gold rush. The character of Dagny is a writer, and she composes sketches to send to Norway, where folks are eager to learn of how their compatriots are faring in this new world. Dagny “adopts” the infant daughter of a dead Sámi woman whom she’d befriended and falls in love with a Sámi man much her junior. Eventually readers are led to believe that Dagny longs to return to Bergen—but does she? And then there’s the issue of the Sámi, whom the dominant Norwegians treated much the way those in the U.S. treated the Native Americans, destroying their culture and forcing their children into boarding schools. Sjoholm is an experienced writer and gifted storyteller, eloquent on the subject of Sámi prejudice and the poignant dilemma for all immigrants: Make a life for yourself in this new world, or surrender to the emotional pull of the old country? In that sense, the book tells a fascinating story of homesickness and prejudice. And while Dagny has her own demons (“Who does the past belong to and how do you mend the errors that you’ve made?”), she ends up being not just a survivor, but a humane model for all of us.
An engrossing novel that features a memorably strong, vibrant female character.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991120609
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Cedar Street Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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