A family saga light on personal interactions but filled with historical nuggets.
Wiens’ novel, the first of a two-volume series, offers a fictionalized history of his Mennonite family, from the 19th century in Russian Ukraine to their arrival in America in 1922.
In 1894, 7-year-old Gerhardt Wiens is on a ship with his parents and siblings heading back to Europe. Although happy with his American life in a Mennonite community in Kansas, Gerhardt is nonetheless excited about this new adventure, which will bring him to his homeland in southern Ukraine. His father, Heinrich, has grown disillusioned with what he sees as the chaos of American culture, where strikers can stop rail travel and the government changes every few years. “America is too politically unstable and will probably come to another revolution,” he tells his sons. “We’ll be better off back in Russia where it’s peaceful, stable, and safe.” Little does he anticipate the turmoil that will bring havoc to his family over the coming decades. The Wiens family are prosperous farmers, and Heinrich increases his holdings during the first decade of the 20th century. In 1910, Gerhardt decides it’s time to marry, have children, and become a landowner in his own right. Shortly after his wedding, he sets out for southern Siberia and purchases farming land in Kazakhstan. When World War I erupts, everything changes. Originally exempt from military service on religious grounds, Gerhardt is drafted into the ambulance corps—then comes the Russian Revolution. Gerhardt and his family are the center of the narrative, but the presentation of their individual sagas is more factual than emotional in tone. The drama in the story rests in the gritty details of the world war on the Eastern Front, with its massive losses of troops and military disorganization, both leading to dissension in the ranks, followed by years of violence in which competing factions of communist revolutionaries battle for control of the empire. More uplifting are the sections that portray the kaleidoscope of nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural traditions that co-existed—occasionally amicably, other times less so—in what was the Russian Empire.
A family saga light on personal interactions but filled with historical nuggets.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798987879627
Page Count: 268
Publisher: H.P. Waterhouse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2023
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
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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