A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.
Madden’s novel celebrates the Ohio River Valley in the 1960s and follows the intersecting lives of two young locals as they grow into adulthood.
Steubenville and Mingo Junction, Ohio, are towns dominated by Wheeling Steel. Jack Clark is the oldest child in a large, loving Irish Catholic family; his father, Tom, tried to escape Steubenville, but fate brought him back home and he took a job in the steel mill. Laurie Carmine’s Italian family is more well-to-do; her father took advantage of the G.I. Bill and became a doctor. The Clarks live right on the river; the Carmines live well away from it. However, Jack and Carmine meet in seventh grade in parochial school; shy Jack is smitten with Laurie right off the bat. The narrative tells their stories, but especially Jack’s: his school friends and his doubts, his striving in high school sports (a very big deal), and his dreams for the future. A keen sense of time and place is present, featuring such elements as the songs that the teens danced to; Jack’s first car, a Plymouth Valiant; the Vietnam War; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963; and the 1968 spring that claimed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and any innocence America had left. Do Jack and Laurie finally triumph as their love grows and deepens? To Madden’s credit, he keeps readers guessing in that regard; Jack goes missing in action in Vietnam, Laurie marries someone else, and that’s just for starters. A disclaimer tries to separate history from fiction, but it also notes that Jack’s life shares strong similarities with Madden’s. The book gets off to an awkwardly expository start with a scene of Laurie’s father laying out the whole Carmine family history at their Thanksgiving dinner. Soon, however, the story takes over and gingerly coexists with bits of local lore that the author seems proud to include, along with uncredited black-and-white photographs of various locations mentioned in the book, as well as footnotes.
A debut novel of the ’60s that becomes more engaging as the pages turn.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9798987066812
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Potomac Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
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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