A rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.
Set on a plantation in antebellum Louisiana, this historical novel will remind readers of the long reach of Greek tragedy.
The story really begins when the Jenseys buy some enslaved people in 1843, including—as a companion for their daughter, Kate—a pretty, young biracial girl named Monette. The Jenseys own the Fox Creek plantation, upriver from New Orleans. They are William and Sarah, and their two children: Kate and her older brother, Breck. William is rightly proud of Fox Creek, which he took over after his father’s death. He and Sarah work hard and William treats enslaved people fairly by his lights, and better than most of his neighbors do. He disciplines them if he has no other choice, but he also rewards the group. Farming is often chancy, yet he is determined to eventually leave a prosperous Fox Creek to Breck. Then comes trouble, the depth of it hardly recognizable at the time. One of the newer enslaved workers, Sawney, insists on hoeing cotton by himself, not with a gang, the practice at Fox Creek. Of course, the real issue is insubordination. William tries, fruitlessly, to reason with the man. William ends up shooting a fleeing Sawney in the hip. Now, William has made an implacable enemy who will lurk on the edges of the story from then on. The climax of the tale is classically tragic—and aching with the irony that no Jensey had seen it coming, although attentive readers will, at least in broad outline.
While this is Torrey’s first novel for an adult audience, the author of 12 children’s books is experienced and it shows, especially in the compelling period details and the depth of these characters. Readers learn about daily life on a working plantation. Even though plantation life offers its diversions and rustic celebrations, William and Sarah don’t swan around drinking mint juleps all day. In addition, the neighbors’ talk of the looming conflict between the states just makes William uncomfortable. He is no firebrand. William is a man of his times, totally captured by the masculine myth. He loves his wife—she deserves it—and worries about Breck, who works hard to please Papa but is bookish and hardly looks forward to taking over the plantation. Kate comes closest to the Southern belle stereotype, but she is, after all, a typical romantic teenager. Monette has affected the siblings’ lives in sometimes-terrible ways. And where, exactly, is a biracial girl supposed to fit into the Southern social scheme of things? Underlying it all, of course, and driving the absorbing plot is that “peculiar institution,” slavery, and the Jenseys’ desperate attempts to normalize an enormity. The Jenseys do their part in maintaining that fiction and so do the enslaved. But then comes Sawney, the rebuke to it all, the embodiment of smoldering rage, the avenging warrior. In this riveting story, Torrey exhibits a keen writer’s instinct for the metaphorical. Here is William in a heated showdown with Breck: “But no sooner had relief soothed his battered spirit, it flitted away again like a bird undecided where to roost.” And in a lighter vein: “It wasn’t until September peeped its head around the corner of August.”
A rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991455527
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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