A deftly told story of the difficulties that come from living close to the wild.
Heacox’s novel follows three overlapping lives in a remote Alaskan town.
Salt d’Alene is a devout Christian and former trapper who lives with his family in the coastal Alaskan village of Strawberry Flats. He’s trying to provide for his wife, Hannah, and four sons—including Solomon, who has muscular dystrophy—but money’s tight even after working 60 hours a week at a mechanic shop. Salt gets a covert offer that could pay for his son’s medical treatment and requires him to keep an eye on the pack of wolves that’s recently taken up residence near town. The wolves include Silver, a young male with exceptional hunting abilities, even if the rest of the pack fails to appreciate them—a mistake, given how scarce food has become. Eleven-year-old Kes Nash has just moved to her uncle’s compound outside of Strawberry Flats. Her father hasn’t spoken since his Humvee was blown up in Afghanistan—an incident that cost him his legs—and the family hopes time in remote Alaska will help him recover. The community of veterans living there isn’t thrilled when they learn that a road and bridge are planned that will connect Strawberry Flats with the rest of the world—a scheme that will also affect the fate of Silver’s pack of wolves. The novel’s painterly prose evokes Alaska as a place of great beauty and scarcity, where animals of all sorts compete for space and food: “Silver awakens, startled by the moonlight and a deep-throated growling coming from the direction of the dead whale. On his feet in an instant, he travels fast through the shadowed forest….He finds the big male coastal brown bear atop one end of the whale, near the head.” Salt is an especially memorable character of fascinating contradictions. The book mostly manages to overcome the sentimentality of its premise (sympathetic wolf point of view, wounded war veteran) to present a well-plotted tale of frontier utopianism that should appeal to nature lovers.
A deftly told story of the difficulties that come from living close to the wild.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781513139111
Page Count: 304
Publisher: West Margin Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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