A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.
Against a historical backdrop of UFO sightings, a dying man tries to nudge the world along a righteous path in Kaufman’s novel.
Rhome, Texas, 1897. August Simms has returned to Rhome ostensibly to investigate reports of mysterious airships landing there. But his purpose for returning to Rhome is twofold. August is also dying and wants to spend his final days at the Martin family boardinghouse where his wife, Christy, died some 15 years before, and he wants to be buried beside her. But life keeps happening in the interim to interfere with his plans. Nadine Martin now runs the boardinghouse and doesn’t remember August at first. But her father was murdered back then, just before Christy’s death, and the true killer (as everyone knew) was spirited off by the railroad bosses; Luther Williams, an innocent local Black man, was lynched instead. August and his old friend Judge Proctor are racked with guilt over not doing enough to stop Luther’s lynching. Racism, no surprise, is alive and well in Rhome in 1897. But then something else comes to light that’s even more incendiary than anything related to racially motivated hate crime. The righteous townspeople (spurred on by the railroad crew) are enraged and will do anything they can to save innocent people in harm’s way. There are more good people to be noted, like Bill Ackerman, August’s wagon driver and wingman, and huge Bose Williams, son of Luther, and Natalie Martin, Nadine’s daughter, who is suffering the throes of adolescence. Kaufman is a fantastic writer with a distinctive poetic touch (consider such lapidary phrases as “a smile threatening the corners of his mouth” or “morning arrives like a shovel to the head”). And August Simms is a charming, sympathetic protagonist; he’s a true font of wisdom and a still point in the storms that rage in Rhome. It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this soulful, poignant novel.
A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132620
Page Count: 284
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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