A gripping story of foes stepping away from the brink of annihilation.
Armageddon looms in this barely fictionalized retelling of the Cuban missile crisis.
In 1962, an American U-2 spy plane returns with photos of missiles the Soviets are installing in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Cold War is already tense, and now U.S. enemies will be able to strike anywhere in the country right from its own backyard. Of course, the Kennedy administration cannot—will not—let this threat stand. Some American generals want to invade Cuba or at least strike the missile sites, which is guaranteed to kill Russians. Others want to blockade all Russian ships headed there and sink the ones that won’t stop—show the world who’s boss. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev must deal with hotheads of his own who are eager to fight and destroy the U.S. Meanwhile, Castro talks like he’s all in for a fight, and he’s angry that he has no control over the missiles. The author portrays the viewpoints of Robert Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev as key players who understand the nuclear abyss they and their families may face. English professor Joseph Russo represents the millions of Americans who are simply scared by the nightly news and are worried that they should have built that family fallout shelter after all. Everyone knows how the story ends, so this well-researched book holds no great surprises. By and large, the main players are rational human beings—when a missile brings down a U-2 and kills American pilot Major Rudolph Anderson, men like R.F.K. urgently work to prevent escalation into all-out war. But Russo’s neighbor says nukes are fine: “All we needed was one good-sized hydrogen bomb, and Cuba would have been a sandbar.” Russo’s children tell him of the “duck and cover” exercises their school principal makes them do. Pupils hiding under desks and neighbors stocking up their fallout shelters strike Russo as foolishness, but along with the dire nightly news, he wonders if President Kennedy can ward off a nuclear holocaust. Spoiler alert: He does, with the help of rational leaders on both sides. As with other Shaara works like To Wake the Giant (2020) and The Old Lion (2023), this is solid history with enough invented dialogue to justify calling it a novel.
A gripping story of foes stepping away from the brink of annihilation.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781250279965
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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