A dramatically arresting and illuminating novel.
In Fanning’s historical novel, an Irish boy growing up in late-19th-century Chicago leans on music to weather familial and political turmoil.
In the 1880s, Jimmy Farrell grows up on the South Side of Bridgeport, Chicago, a neighborhood that’s home to many Irish immigrants. His kin are no strangers to adversity—his grandfather moved the family from Ireland to the United States in 1849 to avoid the ravages of the famine, and Jimmy’s brother, Michael, succumbs to cholera. But Jimmy finds a profound solace in Irish music—beautiful “laments for the lost homeland” and rousing “exhortations to reclaim the Irish nation,” a connection affectingly described by the author. Jimmy establishes a reputation for himself as a “prodigious fiddler” but becomes agitated by the way music is appropriated by nationalist leaders to manipulate their political disciples. The political turmoil in Ireland, a nation yearning for self-rule, forms the backdrop to the tale: Jimmy’s father, John, loathes any terroristic violence irrespective of its intention, but his uncle, Jim, participates in violent revolutionary activity and encourages Jimmy to follow in his footsteps. Fanning’s command of the relevant history, both Irish and Irish American, is impressive, and he vividly brings to life the ways in which a homeland, long after one has left it, can continue to exert enormous influence. The prose occasionally descends into the melodramatic and sentimental—musings about how “jigs and reels brought good cheer to parties, christenings, and weddings” but a “a slow air could help a person survive terrible misfortune” labor too hard to underline themes that are already obvious. The novel is also needlessly overlong, and the plot unfolds at a laggard pace. Overall, though, this is a captivating evocation of a turbulent and complex time for Irish Americans, torn between their new home and their native land.
A dramatically arresting and illuminating novel.Pub Date: April 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781632998064
Page Count: 458
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
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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