A truly engrossing and moving novel from a hugely talented writer.
Sato’s historical novel is based on the true story of Frank Matsura, a photographer who won the hearts of a Washington state frontier town over a century ago.
Born Sakae Matsu’ura, Frank, the son of a samurai, is highly educated and speaks excellent English when he immigrates to Alaska in 1901. Sensing that his life there is threatened by false suspicions, he flees, eventually winding up in the frontier town of Okanogan, in the middle of Washington state. Frank was introduced to photography back in Japan, and his dream is to emulate his idol, Alfred Stieglitz, who pioneered photography as an art form. To keep body and soul together, he does all sorts of menial work, always uncomplaining, and faces the daily vituperation and humiliation that was inflicted upon many Asian immigrants in that time and place. Before leaving Japan, Frank was diagnosed with consumption; he breaks his resolve to remain unpartnered when the beautiful and wise Noriko—the woman he was betrothed to back in Japan until he broke it off when he got the diagnosis—arrives in town: “having seen Noriko again, a woman I had once promised to marry, I felt my solitude like a knife in my ribs.” After many setbacks, Frank finally establishes himself in Okanogan as a successful photographer. Noriko observes that as a portrait photographer, he is better—more sensitive and penetrating—than the revered Stieglitz. The consumption finally claims Frank, a man who never quite realized his own impact and worth, in 1913. Frank emerges from the narrative as a total human being—intelligent, wise, humorous, and, above all, principled. He’s always strenuously wrestling with his conscience, trying, for example, to reconcile his Christian faith with his service in the Sino-Japanese War. In an appended note, Sato explains how the book came to be and reveals facts about the real Frank Matsura. While the author notes that Noriko is a fictional character, he admits that, after Frank, she is his favorite, and readers will likely feel the same as she returns to Frank’s life as his godsend of a lover.
A truly engrossing and moving novel from a hugely talented writer.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9798996518623
Page Count: -
Publisher: Chikara Road
Review Posted Online: July 15, 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
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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