An unpolished but entertaining tale of conflict, romance, and derring-do in frontier Wyoming.
A railroad ramrod, a U.S. Marshal, and a determined young woman with Crow heritage risk their lives to expose fraud in frontier-era Wyoming.
Arriving at the depot in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the spring of 1883, 30-something Arthur Edwards has no inkling how quickly and dramatically his life is about to change. A Civil War veteran and right-hand man to the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, he’s excited to lead the railway’s extension from Sheridan north into Montana. That will mean forging an agreement with Chief Pretty Eagle for a right of way through the Crow Nation’s reservation lands. But negotiations are at an impasse. Local cattle ranchers, led by the politically ambitious John Harris and the racist Bob Jones, fear that the delay and competition from the Native Americans will bite into their profits. Arthur hires Aylen Perry, who happens to be the chief’s granddaughter, to assist the overwhelmed Cheyenne depot boss. Meanwhile, Harris hopes to pressure her into marrying his son, Ben, to get leverage over her grandfather. Arthur is smart and tough, but he’s plagued by nightmares about the horrific events he witnessed during the war on a mission to bring Union spy William Lloyd out of Confederate territory. Aylen is calm in a crisis, having seen her mother help her father recover from both the traumas of Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn and a mountain lion attack. She helps Arthur through a difficult episode, and the two become close. Lloyd becomes a U.S. Marshal, and he enlists Arthur as a deputy to investigate possible large-scale fraud by Denver cattlemen that may be connected to a network of crooked ranchers around the country—including Jones. While they’re away, the Sheridan ranchers, desperate to complete the railroad construction without making any concessions to the Crow people, decide to take matters into their own hands. They hatch a plot that puts Aylen in danger and risks igniting a war between the Crows and the neighboring Shoshone. The two war heroes must press an untested new locomotive into service, racing back to Sheridan to gather their allies, rescue Aylen, and keep the peace.
Hendrickson packs his tale with a large cast of characters who are engaging but lightly sketched—most are either heroes or villains without nuance. The complicated plot moves quickly, with most events taking place within a month’s time. The majority of the second half splits into separate, parallel tracks for different players. The writing features vivid descriptions of action and lively dialogue, but it also mixes present and past tense awkwardly, sometimes in the same paragraph. (“He sent a railroad stockyard man to go get the Morgan mare.…The same man comes around the bend with the mare saddled and ready.”) The work is occasionally repetitive. For example, the fact that Wyoming was the first place in the U.S. to allow women to vote is mentioned three times in the first 25 pages. Some of the details seem overly modern for the 1880s, such as references to drinking “dark roast” and an outdoor cafe. In addition, although the portrayal of Native American characters is positive, readers may be offended by the use of problematic terms such as braves, bucks, and half-breed, even in describing Aylen’s internal thoughts. Still, Hendrickson’s novel offers an engaging adventure and romance that will appeal to railroad buffs and fans of Westerns and light historical fiction. An unpolished but entertaining tale of conflict, romance, and derring-do in frontier Wyoming.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781958914915
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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