An engaging, legal-minded novel about the scourge of bondage and racism.
A young lawyer witnesses the horrors of slavery and war in Cross’ debut historical novel.
In 1853 Georgetown, Ohio, Gabriel Adams and his family are conductors on the Underground Railroad. Gabe’s father, the Reverend Atticus Adams, is a prominent abolitionist, and their home near the Kentucky border makes it easy for 14-year-old Gabe to help fugitive slaves escape to freedom. Even in a free state like Ohio, it is illegal to help the runaways, but Gabe and his parents risk their own freedom in pursuit of the noble cause. It is through these activities that he meets Jasmine, a young escaped slave whose family passes through the Adams farm. The two carry on a correspondence—Jasmine writing from Canada, Gabe from Ohio—as Gabe grows up, studies law, and becomes more deeply involved in the cause of abolition. (Though he misses John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Gabe defends the man during his subsequent trial.) He fights for the Union during the Civil War, marches with Sherman to the sea, and, along the way, crosses paths with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he’s reunited with Jasmine, but the promises of emancipation and equal rights for Black Americans prove to be temporary illusions as the Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow. (“There was a righteous hope for healing with Reconstruction,” fumes Gabe late in the novel, “but with Reconstruction dead, inequality and the Negro problem will continue for a long time.”) Cross’ prose is direct and accessible. He does not use the time period as the backdrop for a historical romance; rather, the politics, racism, and violence of the time are his subject, and he tosses his characters mercilessly into the scrum. The book is long at nearly 600 pages, and some elements of the narrative lean toward the sentimental, but readers will appreciate Gabe’s lawyerly perspective on the injustice of slavery as well as the stridency of his moral outrage.
An engaging, legal-minded novel about the scourge of bondage and racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2024
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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