Well-developed characters bring new life to a familiar and frightening story.
In this historical novel, two extended German families are torn apart by conflicting loyalties during the rise of Nazism.
Claus Diedrich “Diech” Wessel, the youngest of nine children, was born in Ahrensflucht, Germany, a small village by the North Sea. After digging trenches in the military during World War I, he decides to never again participate in another war. When he returns home, he finds work as a carpenter’s apprentice, which he gradually builds into a career. In the fall of 1922, Diech marries Marie Lucia “Mimi” Hornbostel, and the couple moves in with Mimi’s parents on her family’s farm in Westersode. Their son, Karl-Heinz “Heinzie” Wessel, is born in 1923, but the German economy is fragile, and there’s little opportunity for Diech to buy his own land. Mimi has family living in Absecon, New Jersey, and in 1927, the Wessels cross the Atlantic. Despite confronting some early anti-immigrant hostility, they begin creating their own American dream. Back in Germany, members of the extended Wessel family worry about the rise of Adolf Hitler, who becomes chancellor in 1933. Diech’s brother Fish writes to him: “Who are we but ordinary people caught up in a massive shift, like an earthquake….What can we do but ride out the storm and hope for the best?” From here, the novel—a fictionalized version of author Wessel’s own family history—becomes more ominous and relevant as readers watch the gradual indoctrination of the German populace; Heinzie’s cousin and best friend in Germany, for instance, proudly joins the Hitler Youth. After Mimi returns, in 1934, to her home country with Heinzie and his younger brother Louie to care for her recently widowed mother, readers will find it chilling to observe the fully Americanized Heinzie become a young Nazi. Although the historical details of book burnings and Kristallnacht, portrayed here, are well-known, the author’s strength is in his portrayal of ordinary Germans swept into the increasing horror—some actively, others passively—while others are stilled by fear.
Well-developed characters bring new life to a familiar and frightening story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2023
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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