Readers will enjoy this first-rate naval fiction.
An ambitious naval ensign and his girlfriend wake up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I love being at sea,” muses young Scott Bradley James. “I could live forever out here.” So he attends the Naval Academy, graduating in 1941. The story proceeds at an unhurried pace as it develops a decent but far from perfect man. Scott scrapes together the money for his girlfriend’s illegal abortion, from which she dies. The academy tests the honesty and honor he had thought were at his core. A cheating scandal erupts; though guilty, he’s not caught. Both events weigh heavily on his conscience as he begins his naval career. In Hawaii, a woman nicknamed Kai enters his life as an integral part of the tale. In bed with her, he’s technically AWOL when Japanese fighters attack Pearl Harbor, but he’s close enough to race back to his crippled ship, the USS West Virginia, as the fight rages. Afterward, ambition, guilt, and jealousy gnaw at his soul, though he keeps the latter in check. Still, goddamn it, other people are getting the medals—like Chief Petty Officer John Finn, who earns a Medal of Honor—and not him? “It’s like I wasn’t even there,” he thinks. He wants to be “in the center of the inferno.” But he grows with his duties at sea and begins to show his mettle. Meanwhile, his relationship with Kai is on the brink of falling apart because he’s gone so long and writes her only infrequently. Will she wait for him? Because a war is on, no one can plan ahead. A Marine might step on a land mine and alter the trajectory of his friends’ lives far into the future. There is an interesting mix of fictional and historical characters: Scott and Kai are imagined, while the admirals and John Finn are not. (That hero was badly wounded at Pearl Harbor but lived to age 100.) Stavridis’ own love of the Navy (where he’s a retired admiral) shows well on these pages as he weaves war with the “career and personal voyage of Scott Bradley James.” The ending leaves an uncertain future, as the war is far from finished, and the author plans a sequel.
Readers will enjoy this first-rate naval fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780593494073
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
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