A funny and subtly subversive historical novel about naïfs in the 19th century.
A satirical historical novel about wayfarers caught up in an American religious revival.
The main action of Hill’s tale opens with the hanging of a man in the French village of Sanvisa in 1885. Arthur Lestables is sentenced to death for “the drowning murder of Henri Deplouc Senior, and, furthermore, for being a troublesome pain in the groin at this very moment,” as a magistrate puts it. Arthur, a seemingly inoffensive writer who’d been hard at work on his magnum opus, The Theory of Human Development, is buried by his 11-year-old son, Auguste, and soon after, the boy and his mother, Annie, flee France for the United States. In Indiana, they take refuge with members of a religious group who call themselves the Solemnites; as their name suggests, they take a dim view of all forms of pleasure (“As long as my performance is unmusical,” one of them confesses, “I still get to go to heaven”). When the Solemnites become involved in a religious revival, Auguste and his fellow fugitives get caught up in it, as well. Hill’s story is convoluted and rhetorically intricate in ways that seem decidedly out of fashion in the modern literary moment but fit well in the era in which it is set. The author frequently presents elegant phrasings, usually to striking effect: “In the woods that bordered the path, finches skipped and diddled, spiders reknitted rain-ripped webs, and snails sapped water that dripped from the leaves of saturated trees.” The tale is also replete with tossed-off humor that often lands; when Arthur is allowed some final words before his execution, for instance, he asks, “Do any of you understand human goodness?” and the magistrate snaps, “I’ll have no rhetorical questions out of you, Lestables”; Deplouc, Lestables’ alleged victim, is described as “a stain upon the very concept of table manners.” Overall, the work will have readers both pondering and chuckling.
A funny and subtly subversive historical novel about naïfs in the 19th century.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9798218081690
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Daisy Dog Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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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