A middling entry in the library of medieval English historical fiction.
A lumbering yarn of a once-and-future British king, save that the future never quite materializes.
How you gonna keep him down on the farm after he’s seen Dijon? John Collan, 10 years old when we meet him, is obsessed with ridding his farm hamlet of a devil goat that, he writes, “knocked me in the mud again today & has TRODDEN churlishly over my back.” John also keeps himself busy absorbing the folk wisdom of the simple Saxons among whom he lives, including a cheesemaker with a salty tongue: “A fucking nuisance, she was,” she says of Joan of Arc. “I like to think Banbury cheese had a hand in her downfall.” Well, along comes a mysterious stranger who reveals that John is not who he thinks he is, but instead the tucked-away descendant of a murdered nobleman and, to boot, a claimant to the throne. Trouble is, the other claimants, among them the last of the Plantagenets and the first of the Tudors, have other ideas. John is hauled off to Oxford to learn his Latin and courtly manners and such. There, his kindly patron tells him, “Your real name is Edward, but we can’t use that yet. In letters we’ve coded you Lambert, so we may as well stick at that. You are Lambert Simons.” His education is polished in Burgundy and Ireland, where he finds love and intrigue, per historical fiction formula. Harkin’s tale is slow-moving, with often labored writing that makes for labored reading, and with a kind of half-commitment to using period language: “Sir James Butler has a maugre against the York kings. He picked the Lancastrian side in the great wars, the doddard.” Suffice it to say that at tale’s end, we’re glad to see John/Lambert/Edward sail off for Spain.
A middling entry in the library of medieval English historical fiction.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803301
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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