A solid historical novel that explores how love, hate, and prejudice can last for decades.
A migrant worker and a rancher's daughter form a lasting connection in this historical novel.
Webster, the author of Soul of Toledo (2016), presents a narrative that bounces between the late 1960s, the 1990s, and beyond, showing the lasting impact that people can have on each other’s lives. Mexican Carlos Montoya, who regularly travels between his home country and the United States as a migrant worker, goes to work in the fields of the Booker family’s ranch in California in 1967. He catches the eye of the owner’s wife, Amy Booker, who hires him to pose for her provocative drawings, which she uses to irritate her husband; however, Carlos ends up sleeping with Amy’s 20-ish daughter, Julie. Although he loves his wife, Isabel, back in Mexico, Carlos also begins an emotional and eventually sexual affair with a local woman, María. Carlos becomes the victim of police brutality—with details revealed over the course of the book—and returns to Mexico, where he wants to forget about his California years. In 1994, as debate rages over Proposition 187, which aims to deny state services to the undocumented, Lilia Gomez, who works for Julie, goes to visit Carlos in Michoacán. Carlos, now a widower, reluctantly tells her the story of his time with Julie; however, he and Lilia later fall for each other. Meanwhile, Benito Ortega, a young San Francisco activist, fights for immigrant rights while discovering his own connection to Carlos, and Julie resolves her own loose ends. Despite the sprawling and occasionally melodramatic plot, this novel is highly readable and easy to follow as the narrative and characters move between different eras and locales. Throughout, Carlos is a challenging protagonist, and his attempts to justify his infidelity are particularly infuriating, but Webster depicts his complexities with empathy. The author’s depictions of racism and brutality straddle the line between evocative and cartoonish (“Don’t you know that ranchers conspire against their workers?” Julie says. “María’s overseer would beat you for fun, then hand you to my father”). Overall, though, they generally help to present a vivid portrait of the challenges that Carlos faces throughout the story.
A solid historical novel that explores how love, hate, and prejudice can last for decades.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9970320-1-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
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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