A captivating journey to a specialized world full of drama.
An art history student stumbles on a hidden treasure in this literary novel.
Catherine “Cate” Adamson is trying to make her way in New York City’s prestigious art world. The Michigan transplant, who relocated after the tragic death of her teenage brother, Matty, is the only woman in her doctoral program at the fictional New York City University. Her adviser, academic bigwig professor Herant Jones, keeps nixing her dissertation proposals. But everything changes on a cold December day on campus when Cate uncovers a scroll of canvas in a forgotten storage room—and trusts her intuition not to tell Jones. It’s a small but stunning painting that may be from the Baroque period (“The composition seemed to be an allegory, perhaps from mythology”). It strongly resembles the works of renowned 17th-century Spanish Golden Age artist Velázquez, but nothing like it exists on record. Cate decides to embark on a trip to Spain, the center of the Golden Age and now home to the famed Prado Museum, armed with the painting she has nicknamed La Gloria, to try to solve the mystery of the canvas and who created it. Was the artist actually Velázquez himself or a mistress? An enslaved person perhaps? On a train in Spain, Cate meets the handsome Antonio de Olivares, who may have a personal connection to the mysterious painting. Once the Prado gets involved with an agenda of its own, Cate must choose between attaining love and academic stardom and finally giving credit to an artist with no voice. Moore is a Prado alum and former gallery owner. Her passion and extensive knowledge of art history show on every page as readers follow Cate from the tiny, drafty room stateside where the puzzling canvas is found to the vibrant, colorful environment that is Spain at Christmastime. As a love interest, Antonio is attractive, intelligent, and supportive, offering his apartment and ancestral family home to Cate as she needs it as well as the potential for a romantic future. But their conflicts when it comes to the painting and Cate’s professional life are realistic. La Gloria itself, a beautifully described and ever enigmatic artwork, is an intriguing character all on its own.
A captivating journey to a specialized world full of drama.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-253-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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