An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper.
The award-winning McFadden tells a tale of grave robbery, the Underground Railroad, and more in a historical novel set in Western Pennsylvania.
It’s 1857 in Hartsgrove, Pennsylvania, and four doctors and a druggist exhume—“resurrect” in the parlance of the era—the body of recently deceased Black man Fudge Van Pelt in order to further their studies in anatomy. This is illegal, and things heat up when a skinned corpse turns up. Another eerie grave-digging episode involves Dr. William Darling, mentored by the old Dr. Cyrus Vasbinder, and two of the co-conspirators who dug up Van Pelt. Will is an earnest young man, and when his patient, little Molly Plotner, goes from near death to robust health and then, supposedly, to death, Will is flummoxed. He and his friends hope to dig up Molly’s body to see if an autopsy will yield answers, but they find an empty coffin. Against this backdrop, the plot goes galloping off, with a dramatic trial, a jail escape, the blossoming of love between Will and the spirited Kathleen O’Hanlon, and a tragic Underground Railroad escapade. The conclusion is both shocking and weirdly believable and satisfying, as befits an author who has earned multiple honors for his work, which was included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. Memorable characters include the kindly but compromised Dr. Cyrus Vasbinder; the bloviating politician Levi Smathers; Henry Westerman, a free Black man known as Black Hen; and the mysterious Augustus Hamilton, who claims to be free but may or may not be. The tremulous desire of old Black Hen for the widow Van Pelt is deeply touching. A wonderful writer, McFadden has a poet’s way with words: “Fudge wore his worry like a necktie”; “[Will] was a free man, shackled to his fears”; “a sleep of refuge more than restoration.” His thoroughly engrossing book seamlessly weaves humor and sadness, wit and tragedy, fear and love.
An exceptional plot and characters make this historical novel a keeper.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-7984-7481-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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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