A captivating chronicle of personal growth and the people and events that influenced it.
A young soldier reflects on his privileged upbringing as he prepares to fight on D-Day.
The story opens on June 6, 1944, as soldier Charles Trammel is preparing to land at Normandy. Through flashbacks, he reflects on his youth, education, and the complicated family dynamics (his father is from a storied political family; his mother hails from a working-class Irish Catholic background) that shaped him. Charles is a privileged teenager navigating bumpy personal waters as World War II approaches. Much of his story takes place at Trammel Academy, a prestigious prep school named for his family where Charles has a strict classical literature teacher in Mrs. Verardi (who will prove to influence him significantly). At home, Charles’ family is often at war; a dramatic dinner culminates in Charles’ liberal mother challenging his grandfather, a conservative senator, who dies later that night from a heart attack. Charles is drawn to his chauffeur, Chauncey, a surrogate father figure whose background helps Charles begin to understand social inequality and the value of character over class. As the war draws closer, Charles finds himself rejecting the expectation that a senator’s son would avoid frontline combat. He joins the military, facing the brutal reality of war. In his final moments before the big battle, Charles acknowledges how the pivotal experiences and relationships in his life have defined him more than his last name. Van Sickle alternates between the fighting on Omaha Beach and the flashbacks to Charles’ youth to craft an engrossing narrative of personal awakening that tackles lofty themes of privilege, identity, and moral courage. The characters are compelling, particularly Charles and two of his prep-school peers, the manipulative and charismatic Jackson Inverness and the gentle and introspective Chilton McGovern (“His father was a first-generation Scottish steel baron and looked like a Viking. As did his mother. And his sister”). The dual timeline works well, allowing readers to track Charles’ evolution as a person and the ways in which the past has shaped his present. Part war story and part coming-of-age tale, this novel is a compelling read.
A captivating chronicle of personal growth and the people and events that influenced it.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326415
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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