Historical burlesque as lively in invention as it is ingenious in execution.
Imagine a post-millennial trickster spin on The Red Badge of Courage only with broader landscapes, complex racial dynamics, and corrosive humor.
Call him Anders. He’s a tall, pale teenage naif who gets so swept up in the maelstrom of the Civil War that by 1863, he’s been a regimental flag bearer for both the Union and Confederate armies before barely surviving the Yankees’ rout at Gettysburg and staggering into an all-Black Union regiment. With the craftiness he’s had to depend on since leaving behind his abusive mother, Anders blends in with his new platoon with stolen blue duds and a claim to being an octoroon (i.e. mixed race). The Black troopers skeptically indulge this white-boy straggler’s story and take him in as one of their own—and they are as motley a crew as can be imagined in anybody’s army. There’s Corporal Tobias Gleason, a playwright specializing in what he calls “speculative theater” about “The American Future.” Also notable among Anders’ new compatriots are Joaquin Geoffroy, a Haitian-born double agent embedded among African American soldiers “to inspire greater brutality against their white countrymen,” an “eternally frowning black giant” named Mole, and Thomas, a grouchy freed slave with ongoing, unresolved grievances against God (and just about everything else). There’s another teenager in the regiment, a bugler named Petey, who’s as “light” in skin color as Anders and is just as vague about his true origins. With a captured, duplicitous white arms dealer named Slade Jefferson in tow, Anders and his adopted brothers-in-arms embark on a perilous, sometimes-savage journey that takes them to a New York City whose streets are stained with Black blood from the draft riots. Then Gleason is emboldened to lead the wayward regiment to San Valentin, a Nevada settlement offering a prototype of a freer, more equitable America “unstained by cotton.” Grand dreams, inflated egos, and cruel twists of fate are often the stuff of great satires and this first novel by Dayle evokes such classic accounts of the human condition in conflict as Candide, Catch-22, and at least a couple of books by Evelyn Waugh.
Historical burlesque as lively in invention as it is ingenious in execution.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781250345677
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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