An often engaging take on a complex artist.
Hood offers a historical novel that explores of the early life of a famed 20th-century poet and feminist.
The future poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who calls herself “Vincent,” born in 1892, has a childhood marked by strife and hardship. The eldest of three daughters, her parents’ marriage is already falling apart by the time she’s born. Her father Henry’s drinking and gambling, makes it difficult for him to hold down a job, and although her mother, Cora, works as a nurse and weaves hairpieces for money, it’s difficult to make ends meet. As a result, the family frequently moves and Vincent is responsible for the well-being of her two younger sisters from a young age. By the time Vincent’s parents formally divorce, Henry has been largely absent for years. Despite the family’s struggles, Cora makes sure that the girls are well-read, and young Vincent’s love for poetry is clear early on. She begins writing poetry at the age of 5, and in 1904, she assembles a book of poetry as a gift for her mother. Hood’s novel is studded with Vincent’s poetry, with chapter titles pulled from her famous 1912 poem “Renascence.” The author, who interviewed the poet’s sister for the work, portrays her subject in all her complexities and doesn’t shy away from showing how vicious she could be. One scene in particular showcases Vincent’s duality: When a pipe bursts in 1904 and ice coats the first floor of their home, Vincent lightheartedly encourages her sisters to skate through the house to complete their chores. However, when she must empty the basins the girls have been using as toilets outside, she flies into a sudden rage and thrusts a knife into a tree. The author also intriguingly explores Vincent’s sexuality, discussing her attraction to her minister’s daughter and her later physical and emotional affairs with both women and men. Overall, it’s a compulsively readable work, even though some sections move so quickly that they can be disorienting.
An often engaging take on a complex artist.Pub Date: May 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798895430712
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2025
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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