A heartfelt, harrowing, and engrossing tale set during the Reconstruction era.
A historical novel focuses on a doctor’s apprentice in Illinois after the Civil War.
As in many of the penny dreadfuls Tom Slocum loves, his adventure starts with the arrival of a mysterious stranger in town. This man turns the teenager’s community of Sandy Ford upside down. Amid the turmoil, 15-year-old Tom discovers that the enemies of freedom may be in his own backyard—and that it often takes sharper skills to save a life than to end one. From the moment Dr. Robert Steele arrives on the Daisy Belleferry in 1871, Tom’s life is forever changed. Though admired for his healing skills, Steele fans the flames of controversy with his advocacy for peace and modern sensibilities in the Ku Klux Klan–controlled town. Recognizing Tom’s potential as a doctor, Steele makes him his apprentice, sharing his medical wisdom and introducing him to a broader world. But with this new knowledge comes danger, and Tom finds himself targeted by the Klan. When Tom’s father dies, a corrupt bureaucrat confines the teen to an orphanage that’s fueled by forced labor. Compelled to escape, Tom finds shelter with a Black family, reuniting with Steele and further stoking conflict with the local Klansmen. When the Klan’s leader is shot, Tom learns to set aside the ideals of a gunslinger and assume the mantle of a healer. Rife with examples of racism and religious hypocrisy, Raffensperger’s depiction of life in the post–Civil War Midwest may upend cherished notions of the freedom proffered by the American government of the time. Contextualizing these struggles against the backdrop of the brutality of war and its aftermath, the story calls into question the justification of systematized violence—extolling instead the power of education and true charity. But the author offers more than a thoughtful political story. Filled with excitement, intriguing medical interventions, and the triumph of forbidden love, the gripping historical adventure will delight readers.
A heartfelt, harrowing, and engrossing tale set during the Reconstruction era.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68235-519-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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