A smart and gripping portrait of the many facets of conflict.
A military strategist helps shape a plan that results in her estranged pilot husband flying a perilous mission in Rhodes’ World War II novel.
This fourth book in the Breaking Point series continues the story of Eleanor Shaux, who works in Great Britain’s Allied planning and intelligence services, and her Royal Air Force wing commander spouse, Johnnie. The novel opens in 1942 with Johnnie in Australia, touring aircraft factories; people there hold him in awe, as he fought in the famed Battle of Britain. Eleanor, meanwhile, is a confidante of U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In a push to roll back Axis forces in Europe, strategist Eleanor is charged with devising a way to fatally weaken the German economy, and this involves the development of a strategic bombing campaign. Johnnie returns to England to test new weapons, but his perception of the war is changing; he’s come to see it as “organized killing on a grand scale.” Soon, he’s tasked with a risky flight that his wife approved, and she worries if her spouse, with whom she has a fraught relationship, will make it home alive. Military aircraft buffs will delight in the detail that Rhodes supplies regarding technical specifications: “Mosquitos had four cannons and four machineguns in the nose, all packed tightly together and firing straight forward along their axis….” The author is equally capable of eloquently communicating the emotional difficulties in Eleanor and Johnnie’s marriage: “Instead of all the other things that married couples do, they just went to bed to escape from the rest of the world.” Some descriptive passages prove a bit heavy-handed: “Someone dropped a pencil, and it sounded like a boulder.” Still, the intricate storyline and Rhodes’ enviable knowledge of military history successfully keep the narrative moving. A section in which the author clarifies which events actually occurred allows readers to easily distinguish fact from fiction. Overall, this is a clever novel that ably moves between the politics of Whitehall and the white-knuckle ride of aerial combat while also offering an unconventional love story.
A smart and gripping portrait of the many facets of conflict.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781735373645
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Roundel House
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2023
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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