Top-shelf historical fiction delivered with wit and compassion.
Two women witness the horrors of World War II via a snack truck.
Pulitzer Prize and NBCC Award finalist Urrea’s remarkable, elegantly written novel focuses on the Red Cross’ little-known Clubmobile Corps, which during World War II was charged with bringing coffee, doughnuts, and good company to weary GIs. The women had no medical training and were often condescended to as “Donut Dollies,” but because they were stationed in the heart of battle, they played no small part in improving morale and required a steely resolve of their own. Irene Woodward, who’s escaped New York and an abusive fiance, and Dorothy Dunford, who’s left her family and failing farm in Indiana, are paired together in a massive truck that, across the novel, heads from England to France and Germany in 1944 and 1945. En route, they witness some of the worst the post–D-Day European theater has to offer, from bombs to snipers to death camps; during lulls, the two fend off their share of harassment as well. (It’s all a recipe for PTSD and overwhelming for many; the Clubmobile was designed to be operated by three women, but so many drop out there’s a running gag about an unnamed “Third Girl in the Truck.”) Irene, artsy and romantic, has an opposites-attract rapport with the no-nonsense Dorothy, which Urrea plays for both humor and pathos, but he stresses how unified they are in absorbing the constant surprises and tragedies of warfare; a sunny retreat to Cannes is followed by a trek to Buchenwald. This material is personal for Urrea, whose mother served in the Clubmobile Corps, and a few sentimental notes slip into the story. But there’s plenty of grit, detail, and twists that make for both a fine page-turner and an evocation of war’s often cruel randomness.
Top-shelf historical fiction delivered with wit and compassion.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780316265850
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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