A haunting, imaginative vision of America’s blighted origins, conveyed in sometimes-bruising language.
An Englishwoman in colonial New Jersey battles loneliness, deadly snakes, the Royal Navy, and a horrible husband in Hill’s epic poem.
Hill’s yarn opens in the year 1702 with Edmund Talmadge, a ship’s captain fresh from England, depositing Esther Talmedge, his new bride, on the New Jersey shore before promptly sailing off to Annapolis. Stuck in a fishing shack by a salt marsh in the middle of nowhere, Esther learns to fish, dig clams, and sling rocks to knock pigeons out of the air. She also gets help from a woman named Welania, a Lenape hunter who gives her a haunch of venison; Hannah Fearson, an old, sightless woman who was imprisoned during the Salem witch hunt; Samuel, who’s on the run from his former enslavers; and a feral boy called Blue. Esther herself experiences extreme, seemingly random dangers. A British warship happens upon her while she’s swimming in the nude and briefly takes her prisoner on the grounds that any woman who can swim must be a witch. She’s repeatedly attacked by a marsh snake, and she’s almost killed by hunters who are torturing an enslaved couple and tormenting a bear and her cubs. Esther also pieces together stray rumors that her husband is actually a cruel enslaver with a sideline in serially marrying rich women, whom he then murders, along with their families, in order to gain control of their inheritances—a fate that, she surmises, he has in store for her. When, after months away, Edmund finally reappears in his ship, the stage is set for a battle royale.
This novel in verse paints a dark, sometimes-lurid portrait of an America “with slavery and death at its foundation, / blind to everything except expansion,” where toxic rapacity is rooted deep in the raw wilderness itself. (A leitmotif is the repetitive struggle of a plucky osprey against a vicious bald eagle.) Esther embodies this theme: She witnesses racism and misogyny and finds refuge in an egalitarian community of outcasts; later, she feels the enticement of greed and hierarchical privilege herself. Hill presents an atmospheric panorama of the colonial frontier, its natural abundance both awesome and squalid as vast flocks of passenger pigeons darken the sky (while relieving themselves on Esther). The narrative is streaked with magical realism, with many sections written from the viewpoint of rabbits, fawns, raccoons, and birds who understand English and eavesdrop on the machinations of humans. Hill writes mostly in a steady, supple iambic pentameter that feels smooth and natural, but occasionally the poetry breaks into a fragmented, breathless impressionism when Esther’s under extreme pressure. The writing is wonderfully evocative, conjuring intense moods via an accretion of searing imagery: “No skin is left on the palms of my hands,” Esther observes as she tries to bury the bodies of seven women she found rotting in the marsh. “My clothes are black and wreaking of decay, / nerves numbed, so I no longer look away / when muscles fall from bones in ragged strands.”
A haunting, imaginative vision of America’s blighted origins, conveyed in sometimes-bruising language.Pub Date: June 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781066688418
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Selkie Songs Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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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