Poignant and historically fascinating, with plenty of high-speed action.
Bryant presents a historical novel based upon the true story of a woman who became one of Virginia’s most notorious bootleggers.
Willie May Collins, born in 1903 to a southwestern Virginian farming family, harbors a powerful streak of independence and a fierce desire to become something more than the wife of a poor farmer. She also has a knack with machinery, especially automobiles. In 1918, at 15 years of age, she takes a job in a tobacco factory rolling cigarettes. Two years later, she moves to a rooming house in Roanoke and lands a job at the local five-and-dime, where she attracts the attention of Floyd Carter, son of the richest bootlegger in the county. He picks her up after work in his Buick convertible. Willie convinces Floyd to let her drive his car, and the fire is lit. (She doesn’t love him, but she is having fun.) Before long, when Floyd promises to buy her a car of her own if she agrees to marry him, she becomes Mrs. Willie Carter. Married life is luxurious, but Willie becomes bored and irritated with Floyd. Her father-in-law, however, sees promise in Willie and offers her a job as one of his drivers delivering moonshine. It’s just what she’s been hoping for. Thus begins an exciting, dangerous, and heartbreaking career that will make her infamous. Bryant’s novel is packed with details highlighting the intricacies of bootlegging—the complicated routes and detours, the payoffs to local law enforcement, and, always, the incredible speeds at which the heavily fortified cars traveled. The book also has interesting tidbits about the manufacture of moonshine, a local industry that went back over generations of folks living in Floyd County, Virginia. Willie May’s tale is recounted in two voices, hers and that of her devoted younger brother, James (also called Junebug or Jimmy). In prose distinguished by a distinctly Southern musicality, Bryant captures the physical beauty and the atmosphere of southwest Virginia; Jimmy says of a summer day, “The humidity is so heavy I think about how a fish senses an angler’s bait underwater.”
Poignant and historically fascinating, with plenty of high-speed action.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781685135546
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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