Great characters, superb storytelling.
The middle entry in a trilogy—following Nero (2024)—about Roman Emperor Nero’s turbulent life.
In the year 50, the 30-something Agrippina marries the 60-something Emperor Claudius, who adopts her son, Lucius, and renames him Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. The young lad is a handful, having managed with his friends to kill their tutor with a sack full of wasps. Luckily, he’s a minor and has his mother’s fierce protection. Quite the beauty, Agrippina “strangles poor Claudius in her skirts” and is rightly called “a destroyer.” Enemies seek to disgrace her and expose her to Claudius as a “faithless whore.” She kills him with foxglove powder supplied by her auspex, Locusta, opening the door for Nero to become emperor at age 16. But wait, what about Britannicus, the emperor’s biological son? Claudius said he’s next in line to be emperor, but the boy is an obstacle in the way of Agrippina’s ambition. Younger than Nero, Britannicus is but a pesky detail. Earlier, Nero tried to get him killed in a chariot race and nearly succeeded. Iggulden weaves a complex yarn based on events reported 50 years after the fact by writers such as Tacitus, so readers may wonder if the real Nero was as nasty as he appears to be. The best answer is to call it fiction and enjoy. Many details are marvelous, like the mock naval battles held in arenas that Roman engineers flood with sea water. It’s about the depravity of a mother and son seeking raw power and about the clash of wills that proves her undoing.
Great characters, superb storytelling.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368891
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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