This well-crafted love story will draw in many readers and delight them.
A Georgian romance sequel portrays the social jostling, wrangling, love affairs, and subtle intrigues of a group of English aristocrats.
Field offers a smorgasbord of plots and subplots for readers’ delectation. Right off the bat, for example, Robert Church, Geoffrey Chatswell-Brawley’s half brother, must be disabused of the notion that his son, Harry, might become the Fourth Earl of Stoneleigh. Then the London season begins, and the lovely Joanna, daughter of Geoffrey, the Third Earl of Stoneleigh, and his wife, Anne, makes her debut in society. She is in love with the dashing Capt. Francis Hardwick of the Dragoons but first must suffer the advances of such men as the boring Lord Arundel, whose bride will become a duchess. And then Anne’s younger brother, Will, comes home from Barbados with a Black wife. This of course causes a veritable earthquake of consternation, not to mention pangs of conscience regarding these wealthy people’s connections to the slave trade. Will the love between Joanna and Hardwick prove stronger than any challenges, and will they live happily-ever-after? Field is quite enamored of this period and these characters. Some are foppish, shallow, or boorish, and she is happy to make fun of them. Others are kind and wise—think of the best people at Downton Abbey. The author does go on and on about costumes and décor, a staple of the genre, and there is more than a touch of the bodice-ripper here (Hardwick gazes at Joanna “with smoldering eyes”). Meanwhile, these elegant folks can tear up at the drop of a calling card. Still, any novel that is prefaced with not one but three aristocratic family trees clearly means business, and Field delivers. She displays a deft hand at character sketching. The outlandish—to modern sensibilities—becomes, if not believable, oddly enjoyable.
This well-crafted love story will draw in many readers and delight them.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73743-432-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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