Even fans of the Brontës’ wonderful novels won’t find much to cheer for in Powell’s depressing account.
A fictional dive into the tragic yet productive lives of the three Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.
The title comes from a line in one of Emily’s poems, and British author Powell attempts throughout to capture Emily’s gothic lyricism along with her viewpoint of the Brontës’ relationships with each other and the Victorian world they inhabited. Emily begins her narration in 1842 when she arrives to join her older sisters—Maria, 10; Elizabeth, 9; Charlotte; 8—at Cowan Bridge, the model for the dismal boarding school where Jane Eyre spends her early years. Before long, Maria and Elizabeth have died from contagions they catch at the school. Death dominates this book. No one lives long, and the deaths are frequently gruesome. The surviving sisters come home to their father’s parsonage among the Yorkshire moors. There, they share with Branwell and youngest sister Anne a childhood strictly religious yet rich in ways to grow their imagination. Sibling rivalry works in tandem with sibling devotion from childhood through adulthood. Anne is the quiet, steady observer whose chance for a normal bourgeois life ends with the early death of her conventional suitor. Always-hungry Charlotte is aggressive and ambitious but somewhat sociable. Her authorial success is touted here mainly for its financial, not literary, value. Introvert Emily, who rarely talks outside the family circle, is the family’s creative genius and iconoclastic thinker, and Branwell’s early promise of brilliance is derailed by his emotional imbalance. Powell’s Emily bases the character of Heathcliff not on Branwell, but on a darkly handsome, crudely masculine farmer she first encounters as a boy on the moor, then as a man in increasingly suggestive scenes in which they never directly interact. To Emily, happiness is an elusive, even impossible option. Even her imaginative play offers more solace than joy.
Even fans of the Brontës’ wonderful novels won’t find much to cheer for in Powell’s depressing account.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661092
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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