An absorbing character-driven narrative that gives a little-seen Stateside view of the WWII years.
Serendipitous encounters bring five restless young adults together in Texas, all of them heading west for new beginnings in this novel from Mack.
In April of 1943, with World War II still raging in Europe, New Yorker Tilda Morrison decides it is time for her to see something of the world outside her beloved hometown. The war brings prosperity to the city through stock market windfalls and jobs, but the fighting across the ocean is also wearing everyone down. Tilda’s two brothers and her brother-in-law are off fighting across one ocean or another, and her parents’ small apartment is starting to feel cramped. She heads into the train station with no specific plans or destination, just the desire for something different. Three months later, on a ranch in Pecos, Texas, Dusty Rhodes is loading up his mother’s station wagon: He, too, is leaving home. Dusty’s older brother Chet has been killed in the war. Chet was their father’s favorite, and he had been raised to take over operation of the family ranch, which now includes oil wells: This favorable development made the family more prosperous than they had ever expected. With Chet’s death, responsibility for ranch management falls to Dusty, who feels stifled under his father’s unforgiving thumb. He eventually decides it’s time to leave for California and find his own way of making a difference in the world. Along the way, he stops for a hitchhiker, one Jack Scoggins from Arkansas, whose dream is to join the Navy. But first, he wants to see America, so he has been hitching his way westward to San Diego, where he plans to sign up at the city’s naval recruiting center. In a diner on the outskirts of Houston, they meet Tilda, who is waitressing alongside Lucy Rivers. When Dusty invites Tilda to join them on their ride to California, Lucy is the first to jump with excitement at the idea. But the eclectic group is not yet complete. It is in Dallas that they meet Julia Stafford, a Texas native who has recently received an honorable discharge from the Navy. Lucy convinces her to join up with their westward-bound cadre.
Mack paints a well-observed portrait of Americana, as the narrative ambles through the final two years of the war. The five diverse protagonists’ unique backgrounds, personalities, and secrets that unspool gradually keep things interesting. Although poignant melodrama is kept to a minimum, an assortment of secondary characters who have their own tales to tell add engaging intrigue. Mack packs the narrative with an abundance of interesting tidbits about the everyday challenges imposed by the pervasive war rationing of food and gas (e.g., the national speed limit being 35 mph to save fuel). Tilda, who once worked in the H&H automat, secures a job in a movie studio commissary, introducing a glamour and an unconventional romance into the storyline. However, although the novel is entertaining, it abruptly ends rather than concludes, with several threads left dangling.
An absorbing character-driven narrative that gives a little-seen Stateside view of the WWII years.Pub Date: July 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781644568361
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2025
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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