A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.
Gilbert Chevalier, the (fictional) Haitian-born hero of the 1950 U.S. World Cup soccer team, recounts the story of his brief, mostly charmed life while at death’s door.
Gilbert, “aka Gil the Voodoo Child, aka Kid Haiti, aka Le Walking Heartbreak…Le Savoir,” is several years removed from shocking the world with his game-winning goal during the U.S. team’s upset of heavily favored England when he faces a firing squad in Fort Dimanche, “the worst place to be in Haiti.” His execution day climaxes years of imprisonment under the brutal dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, among whose lovers is Gilbert’s estranged wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of an exiled Nazi. As you can tell, Gilbert’s life is complicated; there are many women, including the love of his life, Aurélie, who was engaged to Gilbert’s brother when he began his romance with her shortly after marrying Elizabeth. By that time, Gilbert is a soccer prodigy who must forsake the Beautiful Game when he leaves for New York City in the late 1940s to study economics. While there, he rooms with the already celebrated trumpeter Miles Davis and learns much about life, love, money, and the varieties of American racism clotting the streets like weeds. Football rudely reenters Gil’s life when a soccer ball slams into his face as he’s walking through Central Park. He starts playing his way back to his youthful virtuosity and, though he never becomes an American citizen, he is recruited to join a patchwork Team USA for the 1950 World Cup competition in Brazil, where fame and still more complications await, leading to his fateful run-in with Papa Doc. Inspired by the real-life saga of soccer legend Joe Gaetjens, this follow-up to Léger’s debut novel, God Loves Haiti (2015), plays fast and loose with chronology, conflating historic personalities and events so much as to flirt with flagrant anachronism. Yet, like its predecessor, the novel moves with lyrical, imaginative force, especially in its vivid evocations of soccer play, while also showcasing the author’s penchant for orchestrating funny and poignant romantic interludes.
A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780374619886
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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