A captivating and skillfully constructed weaving of history and romantic drama.
A novel set in Harlem during the early 1960s explores competing factions in the civil rights movement.
Jason Tanner has just made a momentous decision. Sitting at a table in Atlanta’s Paschal’s Restaurant with the major leaders of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest campaign—including a young man named John Lewis, who would become a civil rights icon— Jason volunteers to set up a grassroots outreach storefront in New York City. His parents are not pleased that their eldest child, who had never stepped foot outside of Georgia until he joined King’s march on Washington, D.C., is heading up north to a city filled with danger. Meanwhile, in that very city, Anita Hopkins, born in Brooklyn, is attending a Malcolm X rally. “You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution,” he intones. Anita cheers along with the crowd, handing out leaflets and encouraging his supporters. In September 1963, Jason boards the bus from Atlanta to New York. As passengers disembark at a Philadelphia rest stop, he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful young woman sitting across the aisle. And so the “do-gooder” Georgia boy meets the fiery, street-wise city girl. Their first encounter does not end well. Hill’s enjoyable, well-paced, and deftly structured novel, which features historical photographs, is filled with musical allusions, including a Christmas Motown spectacular at the Apollo Theater. Her descriptions of the sights, aromas, and tempo of Harlem—the ’60s Northern Black cultural and intellectual center—in all its diversity, are vivid and reflected through two strong, fully drawn protagonists. They are opposite sides of a coin—he is shy and uncertain about his future in New York; she is an exuberant poet with a beautiful voice. He is gentle, speaking in a soft Southern cadence; she is passionate and edgy. He is a pacifist; she is a militant. But the vibrancy of Harlem, the excitement of listening to Anita read her poetry at the B-Flat nightclub, and a magnetic connection that keeps each in the other’s thoughts eventually work their magic in this powerful tale.
A captivating and skillfully constructed weaving of history and romantic drama.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64063-829-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sideways Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Who tells your story? Williams illuminates why women needed to be in the room where, and when, it’s written.
The Herculean efforts required to assemble the Oxford English Dictionary are retold, this time from a fictionalized, distaff point of view, in Williams’ debut novel.
Esme Nicoll, the motherless young daughter of a lexicographer working in the Scriptorium—in reality, a garden shed in Oxford where a team led by James Murray, one of the OED’s editors, toiled—accompanies her father to work frequently. The rigor and passion with which the project is managed is apparent to the sensitive and curious Esme, as is the fact that the editorial team of men labors under the influence of Victorian-era mores. Esme begins a clandestine operation to rescue words which have been overlooked or intentionally omitted from the epic dictionary. Her childhood undertaking becomes a lifelong endeavor, and her efforts to validate the words which flew under the (not yet invented) radar of the OED gatekeepers gain traction at the same time the women’s suffrage movement fructifies in England. The looming specter of World War I lends tension to Esme’s personal saga while a disparate cast of secondary characters adds pathos and depth. Underlying this panoramic account are lexicographical and philosophical interrogatives: Who owns language, does language reflect or affect, who chooses what is appropriate, why is one meaning worthier than another, what happens when a word mutates in meaning? (For example, the talismanic word first salvaged by Esme, bondmaid, pops up with capricious irregularity and amorphous meaning throughout the lengthy narrative.) Williams provides readers with detailed background and biographical information pointing to extensive research about the OED and its editors, many of whom appear as characters in Esme’s life. The result is a satisfying amalgam of truth and historical fiction.
Who tells your story? Williams illuminates why women needed to be in the room where, and when, it’s written.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-16019-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Carefully constructed, utterly predicable.
Williams returns to the fictional Winthrop Island with this contemporary story wrapped around a 19th-century shipwreck mystery.
In 1846, Providence Dare writes a painfully detailed Account of the Wreck of the Steamship Atlantic. Traveling under a false name, she’s on the run after the death her employer, famous painter Henry Irving, for whom she’d served as muse with benefits since his wife’s death. As a storm kicks up not far from Winthrop Island and survival at sea seems increasingly unlikely, Providence realizes she’s been followed aboard by a detective with a warrant for her arrest—for murder. Is she a victim or a predator? The detective’s feelings for her are as complicated as hers for Mr. Irving. (Providence is fictional, but the Atlantic was a real ship that sank in Long Island Sound.) Excerpts from the Account wind around events taking place on Winthrop in 2024, where Williams fans will encounter characters from previous novels; new readers will find the introductory family tree essential as names and connections pile up. Audrey Fisher, a chef who recently lost her restaurant after her business partner husband absconded with all their money, returns to the island for the first time since she was 3. She’s chaperoning her mother, Meredith Fisher, a famous actress with a drinking problem. Meredith has returned to sober up in private on Winthrop Island, where she grew up, always desperate to leave. Soon Audrey meets her father, Mike Kennedy, for the first time since she was a kid, and begins falling in love with a nice man. Then some paintings show up in a trunk and a stranger appears to confront Meredith about her past, and before long all hell breaks loose. The parallels that abound between the two narratives—strange fires, selfish artists, characters on the run, dark-haired men, lies about sex and death—are fun. But with the exception of Meredith, to whom Williams gives layered complexity, cliched characters march through familiar plotting.
Carefully constructed, utterly predicable.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593724255
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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