Deep and dramatic, this engrossing family story will haunt readers.
When a teen’s life is forever changed by an outsider, she must face the costs of her new friendship in this historical novel.
In 1804, 14-year-old Flora MacCallum comes to the New World with her family, looking for hope and new opportunities. In the Old World, their home in Scotland, they faced persecution from the English. This New World, Baldoon, is going to offer a fresh start and a better future. But then everyone grows sick, including Flora, and when she wakes up, her parents and closest sister are dead. Now, Flora is mute and her sister Isobel is constantly frustrated with everything she does. Flora’s brother, Hugh, is trying to do his best for their family, but Isobel disagrees with him (“I’m weary, Hugh….Weary of wolves, bears, snakes startling us from the path. I have a pit of fear always burning in my belly”). She, along with the whole community, is also fearful of the Chippewa living across the river. Meanwhile, Hugh gives Flora a task that will help the family: tending the cows in the barn. One day, she meets a Chippewa boy named Niigaani. At first, Flora is scared of Niigaani, but she soon finds that his visits bring her solace from her loneliness, and she begins to look forward to seeing him. As winter sets in, Hugh takes the family to live on an island for safety. While Flora’s friendship with Niigaani develops, she will soon have to face the consequences of her closeness with an outsider. Alam has created a rich text that fully transports the characters to the world of Canada in 1804. The author has clearly done her research and presents information in a way that highlights and supports the story and players. Flora is an engaging protagonist whose fears, hopes, struggles, and teen angst are palpable throughout the tale. Her siblings are relatable, and their love for one another and conflicts are understandable and realistic given the awful circumstances they find themselves facing. Their plight and Flora’s absorbing story fill the pages of this wonderful book, which maintains a steady pace and delivers a satisfying ending.
Deep and dramatic, this engrossing family story will haunt readers.Pub Date: April 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1735774787
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Blackwater Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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