A compelling story about two people who long for their spouses in a time of war.
A gravely wounded Union soldier heals with the ministrations of a Southern woman.
It’s 1864 in Virginia, and Union Captain Jonathan Weybridge loses his right leg and several fingers on the battlefield at Gilbert’s Ford. A fellow soldier stanches the bleeding by applying a tourniquet, but otherwise leaves him to die. Then, a formerly enslaved woman named Sally discovers him and brings him to the home of 24-year-old Libby Steadman. She is a white woman whose husband, Peter, had freed the people enslaved at the gristmill he inherited and is now in a Yankee prison, if he’s even still alive. Sally and her husband, Joseph, now work at the gristmill, but the other freed slaves have long since skedaddled. Libby has a 12-year-old niece, Jubilee, who refers to Weybridge as a jackal, a not uncommon insult hurled at Union soldiers. Weybridge’s health slowly returns while he frets about his wife in Vermont. Libby and her family come to recognize his human decency, that he’s more than simply a jackal or a “bluebelly.” Meanwhile, rumors circulate that Libby is harboring a wounded Yankee, and she and her family go to great lengths to hide him. She and the captain will quickly hang if discovered. She secretly enlists the help of a local doctor and part-time drunk whom she isn’t convinced she can trust, but she has no choice. Will Libby and the captain ever hear from their beloved spouses again? She refers to him as “someone…I kept alive at a price I could not afford.” Bohjalian’s inspiration for the novel comes from documented historical events—a Virginia woman really did save a Union soldier who’d hailed from Vermont—and the set-up has led to a masterful yarn. No one knows how close to each other the real people became, and there’s no evidence that the real Libby ever shot two Confederate soldiers dead with a Colt pistol or that a freedman (Joseph, in the story) killed a man who’d tried to rape her. Those and other details are a credit to the author’s imagination. If there is a nit to pick, it’s with a title that might misdirect readers’ expectations. It’s not wrong, but don’t expect anything steamy or licentious.
A compelling story about two people who long for their spouses in a time of war.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780385547642
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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