An addictive drama with moments of engaging excitement and an admirable young female hero.
A teenage girl is abandoned by her parents in Whitney’s historical drama of struggle and redemption.
Readers meet 13-year-old Silstice “Silly” Trayson in August of 1934. She is terrified, sitting in the sheriff’s office in Calhoun County, Michigan, after being caught stealing school supplies from her former one-room schoolhouse. Silly is a shy, timid girl, the fourth of six siblings born to poverty-stricken, neglectful, and abusive parents. (The family is known in the community as the “Trashy Traysons.”) Fortunately, Silly has two advocates: Her 17-year-old sister, Alberta, makes assurances to the sheriff that Silly has never been in trouble before, brings her home, and arranges for her to join the local 4-H club, where Edna Goetz becomes her mentor in the girls’ sewing and cooking division. Edna is a gentle and generous elderly lady who develops an immediate fondness for the young girl. Edna’s husband, Vernon, the crotchety, volatile 4-H county Beef Club mentor, is decidedly displeased with Edna’s attention to Silly. When Silly’s house burns to the ground, the fragile girl is left homeless. Her father runs off, never to be seen again; her mother places Silly’s twin 15-year-old sisters with their aunt and takes off with the family’s two young sons to live with her own parents. Alberta moves in with her best friend’s family. Nobody has room for Silly until Edna devises a clever and generous plan to take her in. Whitney’s novel is narrated by three alternating and distinctive voices, those of Silly, Edna, and Vernon, each defining the relationship developing among them. In equal measure, this is an affecting coming-of-age tale about Silly, who begins to find her inner strength and confidence, and the poignant story of Vernon’s gradual transformation (“He hadn’t been an easy man to live with”) after experiencing profound loss. Whitney keeps the action moving with a subplot in which Silly’s brothers become victims of an extortion and child-abduction ring operating in the town. Although the narrative borders on high melodrama, the author viscerally captures the deprivation, hunger, and despair suffered by many during the height of the Depression.
An addictive drama with moments of engaging excitement and an admirable young female hero.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428365
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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