A smartly conceived and emotionally stirring poetic tale.
Two women journey to Colonial America and are accused of witchcraft in poet Secord’s debut novel in verse.
“Don’t think these skills were simple, / they were an art, a craft, a mystery, / yet when the men took notice, / they doubted diligence and named it witchery,” reads the closing verse of this book’s title poem. The skills to which the poet refers are those adopted by 17th-century women to nurture their communities—skills that outsiders distorted and called malevolent acts. This novel initially hurls the reader into the heart of London, England, at a time of plague. Lydea Gilbert and her niece, Kate, tend to the sick with little success, and after losing loved ones, they decide to journey across the ocean. In 1636, they board a ship called the Truelove and set sail for Massachusetts, accepting a period of indentured servitude to pay for their passage. They’re made to work for Hutchinson, a merchant; his wife, Anne, is later put on trial for heresy. Lydea and Kate then travel on to Connecticut, where they go their separate ways, with Lydea going to stay with her cousin, Thomas, and Kate marrying John Harrison, a grower of hops, barley, and tobacco. In 1654, Lydea is accused of being a witch by families she “nursed through pox,” and in 1668, Kate, too, is dragged from her bed and charged with witchcraft. In a final note, the poet reveals that the characters of Lydea and Kate are based on real women, the author’s ancestors, who lived in and were persecuted by Puritan society.
Secord powerfully captures the precariousness of the lives of women healers in the space of a deceptively simple quatrain: “My pockets carry sentimental pieces. / These womb-shaped bags hang below my skirts / hiding needed things, tools for nourishing, / locks of my children’s hair and linen strings.” These brief lines speak volumes about Lydea’s maternal benevolence and the need for her to conceal her practices from those around her. The work presents poems from the separate perspectives of Lydea and Kate, and these first-person accounts shape two psychologically distinct characters. The younger Kate’s vulnerability is palpable on occasion: “I thought that I could live / without her presence, but being with child / again, I wish I could feel her hands.” Secord is also expert at communicating atmosphere, as when, on their arrival in America, Lydea observes: “The air smells / ever green, and trees outnumber men,” a stark contrast to the “many funeral pyres” of the London they left behind. Some readers may be initially skeptical of a novel written entirely in verse, but Secord maintains a strong storyline throughout, and her poetry adds a deeper sense of mysticism. From its opening line, “We kept the small alive from day to day, / kept households warm, kept bread made,” this book is a passionate celebration of historically undervalued daily endeavors of women and a vital reminder of what victims of persecution endured.
A smartly conceived and emotionally stirring poetic tale.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60489-303-8
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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