Fans of Paula McLain and Marie Benedict will enjoy this insightful novel.
In Mickelwait’s historical novel, a woman from New York society embraces France during the Jazz Age.
In 1905, highborn Sara Sherman Wiborg dreams of a life beyond the rigid confines of Gilded Age New York society. She finds her soulmate in Gerald Murphy. He is wealthy, but his family is “in trade” (they own a company that sells luxury goods), and, at age 27, he is five years younger than Sara. Although the union is opposed by both families, they marry in 1915. They agree “to find and celebrate beauty in even the smallest things.” A daughter they name Honoria is born in 1917, followed by two sons, Baoth in 1919 and Patrick in 1920. After some time at Harvard, where Gerald studies landscape architecture, the couple rejects Prohibition and “the commercial, Puritanical vengeance of American society.” The family moves to France. Fully embracing the Jazz Age, their lively social circle includes Cole Porter, Fernand Léger, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sara and Gerald relish the freedom they’ve sought for themselves and their children in Paris and the Cap d’Antibes. As the 1920s end, personal and societal crises upend their lives: Baoth dies of meningitis and Patrick of tuberculosis, and the 1929 stock market crash and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini hasten a move back to the United States. Sara struggles with the knowledge that Gerald is gay, but their harmonious perspectives, love for each other, and grief over the deaths of their sons keep them together. In her first novel, Mickelwait illuminates the life of a woman who is an afterthought among the outsized personalities of the time, especially Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who unflatteringly portray her in their work. (Sara’s own abilities are overshadowed as she supports Gerald and creates a rich, loving life for her children, but she unflinchingly embraces the messiness of existence.) Mickelwait’s descriptions effectively evoke the time and place: “Paris was a living, breathing organism in which fresh ideas were floating on the air waiting to be grabbed, like drunken birds.”
Fans of Paula McLain and Marie Benedict will enjoy this insightful novel.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798888246917
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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