An ambitious but ultimately underwhelming story of immigration and labor.
In Fraser’s debut historical novel, a Scottish couple weathers the challenges of immigration to America.
In 1895 Scotland, William Fraser leaves his native Highlands for Dundee looking for work—even though conventional wisdom says that “you go to Dundee to find a woman, not a job.” This proves to be correct on both counts: William arrives to find the town shut down due to a strike by the women who work at the jute-fiber factories; he finally finds work loading wagons, and through a co-worker, he meets Mary Coyle, one of the jute spinners. The two quickly fall in love, although the pairing is not without controversy; Mary’s Irish Catholic father doesn’t condone her marriage to the Protestant William. William’s pending departure for the United States presents an even greater obstacle: His industrious father, Jack, has gone to work in the mines over there, and he wants William to join him. As William attempts to locate his dad in boomtowns across the American West, Mary lingers with her family in Dundee. Can their nascent love survive the time apart? It will depend on whether William can survive the mines’ deplorable conditions. Fraser’s prose quickly and effectively summons the dust and soot of the era without feeling stilted or antiquated, as in this passage, in which William makes his way through the streets of turn-of-the-century Seattle: “Walking felt good, though William had to dodge Commercial Street’s occupants: people were hawking wares, and men, both well dressed and ragged looking, and women with parasols were looking at storefront windows.” The author also succeeds in recreating the hardscrabble working conditions, both in Scotland and in the United States. However, there’s a feeling of inevitability to the plot that robs it of some of its liveliness. There’s plenty of movement, and it hums along nicely, but readers may find that the characters are generally too likable, and that their relationships feel too clean. Even so, fans of historical fiction will find much here to enjoy.
An ambitious but ultimately underwhelming story of immigration and labor.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-913384-6
Page Count: 366
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 22, 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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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