A straightforward adventure with some engaging characterization that ultimately offers little more than a story of one man’s...
A soldier has difficulty putting war behind him as he pursues a fugitive in Hayes’ Western novel.
It’s 1858, and Maj. Ethan Tucker struggles to make the transition back to civilian life after the Third Seminole War in Florida. He’s also discovering that his legendary reputation as a leader of soldiers isn’t easy to shake. As such, he should have been more wary when Adjutant Gen. Ryder, his longtime friend, summons him. With the threat of secession on the horizon, Ryder wants to give Ethan a command in a reorganized state militia. Ethan is hesitant; his wife Faith’s biggest complaint, which led to their separation, is that he’s never home. He only agrees after Ryder threatens to conscript him, and his first assignment is to transport Alaster Conley—who killed a sheriff and a politician’s son—from St. Marks to Tallahassee. Ethan and Aiden Sage, a young soldier he recruits, transport Alaster by train, but his gang blows up the tracks and helps him escape. The chase is on into South Florida, with Ethan adding Seminole scout Riley to their squad. Later, an injured Ethan becomes concerned as they follow Alaster into the wilds of Florida—the site of Ethan’s wildest behavior in the military—while heading for a final showdown at the fugitive’s hideout. Hayes, the author of the All Hallows Eve Tales series, has written a fairly standard Western, in which good guys chase down bad guys. The handful of secondary players in this brief novel are largely stock characters who play their roles but offer little more. Still, Hayes deserves credit for using pre–Civil War Florida, a different kind of frontier, for his backdrop, and he does the work to make the two leads, Ethan and Alaster, layered characters; both are shown to be products of their environments to some degree. Ethan, in particular, shows growth as a fierce warrior who wants to settle down, and who keeps his violent side in check while on the hunt.
A straightforward adventure with some engaging characterization that ultimately offers little more than a story of one man’s maturation.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781965315095
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Live Oak Key Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2026
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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