A fanciful what-if that makes an unlikely relationship seem not only possible, but joyous.
In Latham’s novel, painter Vincent van Gogh meets poet Emily Dickinson.
Vincent van Gogh loves his new home in Paris, but while he admires impressionism and Japanese block prints, he hasn’t yet discovered his own style. Taking art lessons at Cormon’s atelier, the messy, rustic, and intense Vincent doesn’t fit in with the other younger, more sophisticated students. He tries selling his paintings to tourists as his younger brother, Theo, provides him with food, housing, and tuition. On a parallel track in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson also struggles to make an impact with her art. Former tutor Thomas Wentworth Higginson promises to use his connections to get Emily’s poems noticed, but he seems in no hurry. Considered an overly strong personality, Emily has become an eccentric recluse at the Homestead, and her life threatens to narrow further when she’s diagnosed with Bright’s disease and learns she possibly has only months to live. Gathering her courage, Emily joins her sister-in-law, Sue, on a voyage to Paris. Vincent and the much-older Emily spot one another right away at the Louvre; he notices her bright orange shawl folded around her like bird wings, while she’s attracted to his freckles and high energy. It’s a meeting of minds and hearts, as they have similar goals for their art (“What all people want…is a moment of time,” Vincent states). The setting of Paris plays a central role in the narrative, engaging the senses of the characters. The spring air smells of “star jasmine” and has an “energy…like heat lightning.” (Alternately, the “air tasted like plums.”) Emily, missing the flowers and birds of the Homestead, is charmed, saying of a Paris neighborhood, “This place is a poem.” Supportive Sue and Theo are allowed some character development—Sue’s unhappy about her husband’s affair, and Theo pursues a reluctant woman—but the main focus is on the two artists with the outsize personalities. Latham’s prose can sometimes feel overwrought; Vincent’s “shoes felt too large, his limbs liquid” when spotting his brother. Still, this portrayal of an unlikely love match between two people who never fit in anywhere is engaging.
A fanciful what-if that makes an unlikely relationship seem not only possible, but joyous.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781964700854
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Historium Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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