A captivating tale of female triumph in the late 18th century.
A young woman hatches a plan to save French royalist sympathizers from the guillotine in Borchert’s historical novel.
This book is the second installment in the Château de Verzat series, which chronicles the experiences of various women living during the French Revolution. This entry follows the exploits of Geneviève, the 17-year-old daughter of public prosecutor Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. Geneviève hopes to travel to America to reunite with her beloved Henri Detré, who has fled the revolution with his sister, Joliette de Verzat, the subject of the previous book in the series. As women are denied an education in revolutionary France, Geneviève poses as her brother to attend university, laying the foundation for an income to fund her passage. She later finds work as a clerk in her father’s offices handling the lists of prisoners destined for the guillotine. When one of the lists contains the name Louis Lagarde, whom she knew at university, Geneviève devises a plan to save his life. The narrative deals expansively with issues of gender and power against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Reflecting on women’s rights in 18th-century France, Geneviève poignantly reflects, “Liberty? All women were free to do was starve.” Borchert’s prose is clean, although there are several occasions in which her characters’ actions are overembellished (“He wiped his hands down the front of his leather apron….He let out a puff of air….[He] looked like he’d eaten a sour cherry”). The author deploys simple, effective similes to vividly animate the characters (“She trembled like a leaf in a windstorm”). Borchert has a keen eye for historical and geographical detail, even alluding to the “mushroom tunnels” that run beneath Paris. All of these elements make for a suspenseful page-turner with an unexpected love story thrown in for good measure.
A captivating tale of female triumph in the late 18th century.Pub Date: July 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780989454575
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Le Vin Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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