A measured but engrossing tale of a tightknit community’s strength.
In this debut novel, a world traveler visits an island off the U.S. coast and mingles in good—as well as dangerous—company.
Globe-trotting Judah Goodwin’s latest destination is the United States. But the ship he’s on drops him off at, as the helmsman puts it, “Almost America”—the small island Rio Los Angeles sitting somewhere between Nova Scotia and Maine. Judah, a kind, capable man, quickly befriends the islanders, especially when he helps prevent a house from tipping and sliding into the ocean. Rio Los Angeles has a rich history, as some families have lived there for generations. This includes the Mirandas and the Eldridges, who share a bit of bad blood stemming from a fatal car accident more than a decade ago. Judah grows close to local sheriff Lee Miranda and even joins her profitable “quahog project.” Many islanders band together to harvest these quahogs, large clams that will spruce up anyone’s clam chowder. Sadly, not everyone on the island is neighborly, as three strangers make their way there and seem dead set on ransacking underwater quahog pens. These abrasive men also prove violent toward locals, forcing Lee and others to track them down as swiftly as possible. Meanwhile, Judah learns the ship that left him at the island has sunk with apparently no survivors. This news sparks his memories of the captain, who not only was up to no good, but may have used him as an unwitting courier for looted goods. It’s not long before a menacing individual comes looking for whatever Judah has.
Kent’s leisurely paced story devotes pages to work on the island. Characters, for example, discuss the quahog project and a later plan to harvest sea salt. Other scenes describe the laborious process of digging, packaging, and hauling clams. Many of the details, however, give the narrative color, including the stories that Judah and the islanders trade. He tells of his global travels, from the daily catches of fishing communities in Tanzania, East Africa, to a vault for storing seeds of worldly food crops on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. This is moreover indicative of the author’s sharp prose. Scenes at sea are particularly strong, even with minimal context for readers unfamiliar with nautical terminology: “They rafted the skiff to the Lydia. There was a mismatch in height and there were swells in the current. But foam rubber fenders hanging from Lydia’s gunwale cushioned a rhythmic bumping of the vessels.” While there’s little in the way of individual character development, certain moments pack a punch; a woman endures and recovers from a vicious assault, and more than one islander dies, deaths that unquestionably affect the community. At the same time, potential romance between Judah and Lee is sublimely understated; she calls him Chesapeake (a nod to Judah’s home), an endearing name that only Lee uses. Most of the Rio Los Angeles locals, too, are accommodating; Judah fits in so well with the rest of the cast that one may think the world traveler is not merely visiting but there to stay.
A measured but engrossing tale of a tightknit community’s strength.Pub Date: June 30, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
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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