An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.
A historical novel focuses on the life of a groundbreaking scientist.
In this book, part of the Mentoris Project’s series celebrating noteworthy figures in Italian and Italian American history, Selbo explores the life of 18th-century polymath Laura Bassi. Bassi overcame barriers and prejudice to become the first woman to teach at the University of Bologna. The story opens with 5-year-old Laura asking challenging questions and showing her thirst for knowledge. She begins studying at home with tutors and demonstrates an aptitude for learning and an affinity for the new forms of scientific research that are being developed at the time. Although her mother worries that her daughter’s lack of interest in socializing will doom her to spinsterhood, Laura ends up marrying a fellow academic who supports her research and the laboratory that she establishes at home when the university does not allow her to work on its campus. The author blends lush historical details (“She walked down the center aisle, elegant in a deep blue beaded silk gown, her hairpieces studded with crystals and pearls”) with Laura’s more intellectual pursuits, maintaining a balance between creating the setting and examining more esoteric topics. The book skillfully invokes the Enlightenment themes that drive Laura’s work—science and religion, experiments versus theories, the pursuit of learning—developing them in the text as well as inserting them in characters’ conversations. Readers with limited historical backgrounds will have little trouble following the plot, as Selbo puts Laura’s letters to other prominent scientists, Roman Catholic Church politics, and the characters’ daily lives in the necessary context. The author also adds details and cameo appearances by historical figures who will be familiar to those with knowledge of the era. The novel hews closely to Bassi’s documented history and does an excellent job of plausibly and satisfyingly filling in the blanks of her story. The book is informative without being didactic and delivers an enjoyable narrative that also achieves its educational goals.
An engaging tale based on the life of an intriguing woman.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947431-29-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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