A vivid drama set at the intersection of WWI and a global health crisis.
Andrews’ historical novel tells the story of a father and daughter on the front lines of a pandemic.
Readers first meet Dr. Lorne Miller in 1918 as people in his rural Kansas county start to sicken and die from an unexplained illness. His daughter, Helen, has just come home from nursing school in Boston, hoping to figure out what’s next for her life. What neither of them see coming is a crisis that will change their family, and the world, forever. The narrative covers the full two-year span of the era’s influenza pandemic, alternating viewpoints between Lorne, as he strives to secure research funding in search of a vaccine while pushing for quarantine at the highest levels, and Helen, as she travels to France to care for American soldiers there, fighting in World War I. Lorne works with an array of important historical medical figures, including Drs. William H. Park and Anna Wessels Williams, while Helen dives into a career that she didn’t initially think she wanted. A strong feminism centers Helen’s character, and pivotal moments hinge on whether she will keep equivocating or take advantage of the opportunity and independence that nursing offers her. The author balances intimate and scientific details about nursing uniforms, the repurposing of bathing wagons for sleeping quarters, the fresh flowers delivered from London to the field hospital against the painful specifics of the origin and treatment of gas gangrene, the crowded tenements that allowed influenza to spread, and the pulmonary hemorrhaging and cyanosis that typifies the disease. Overall, it feels like a masterful blend of works by historical mystery author Jacqueline Winspear and historian John M. Barry. Although this book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, readers will find clear parallels in the story’s false starts, haphazard public health response, and supply-chain havoc as people search for the disease’s cause and cure, and the conflicting perspectives of Helen and Lorne allow readers to see it all with fresh eyes.
A vivid drama set at the intersection of WWI and a global health crisis.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2027
ISBN: 9798896364306
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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