An absorbing, romantic twist on the traditional pirate’s tale.
Shortly after marrying a sailor, a woman boards a pirate ship, takes a new lover, and sets off on the adventure of a lifetime in Castle’s historical novel.
Anne Bonny was born to a housemaid who had an affair with her married father, and her nontraditional parentage led to a life in which the cards always seemed stacked against her. To keep her secret from being discovered while still keeping her close, her father dressed her as a boy and had her work as a clerk in his office. Eventually, the ruse was revealed, and she and her dad fled to Charles Town, Carolina. There, as a young woman, she meets a sailor whom she marries behind her father’s back and later abandons for dashing pirate captain Jack Rackham. At sea with Jack, Anne lives a true pirate’s life—defending the ship from attackers, thieving from other pirates, and drinking the day away. During an encounter with another pirate ship, however she finds herself attracted to Mark Read, one of its crew members, who, she later finds out, once went by the name Mary—and Anne’s life, as she knows it, changes forever. Castle’s approach to the tale of Anne and Mary is consistently engrossing—from scenes of battle to moments of panic when Anne realizes that she has been captured (“A rough gunny sack covered my head. I heard distant gulls and felt a familiar pitch and roll and knew instinctively that I was inside a moving vessel at sea, but it was not the William”). The highly descriptive nature of Castle’s prose also has the effect of keeping readers engaged with the progress of Anne and Mary’s relationship. Mark’s secret is revealed early in the story, but readers don’t know when Anne will find out; the author effectively makes readers feel the tension that Mark feels while revealing the truth to Anne (“Remember…I’m still me”) and the relief that comes after Anne’s reaction.
An absorbing, romantic twist on the traditional pirate’s tale.Pub Date: May 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-91-690311-1
Page Count: 122
Publisher: Dark Horse Publishing LLP
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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