This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.
A sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West.
“You can’t save what you don’t love.” That’s the first sentence of Wiggins' new novel and a leitmotif throughout the book—a love story, in the classic sense, as well as a love letter to an American West celebrated by Hollywood even as it was sucked dry by the city of Los Angeles. It's also a lesson in how Wiggins’ languid, linguistically lush and lyrical novel, set in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, found its way to completion. As the author’s daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, relays in an afterword, Wiggins was just a few chapters shy of completing the book when, in 2016, she suffered a massive stroke that affected her sequencing logic and short-term memory. Porzak worked from Wiggins’ notes and with a collaborator to help her mother complete the novel, saving it as a true labor of love. Given that painstaking process and the breathtaking beauty of the bulk of this novel, it would be ungrateful to gripe that the end doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters. To be sure, Wiggins set an extremely high bar. The book follows the experiences of several memorable characters, including Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes, the scion of a wealthy East Coast railroad magnate, who has reinvented himself as a hardworking ranch man and impassioned preservationist; a Chicago-raised Jewish attorney named Schiff, who has been sent by the Department of the Interior to set up an internment camp for Japanese Americans in a desiccated former apple orchard adjacent to Rocky’s turf in Lone Pine, California; and Sunny, Rocky’s spirited daughter, a fiercely talented, mostly self-taught chef with whom Schiff falls in love. Wiggins’ interwoven plotlines—propelled here by romantic and there by familial love—and colorful characters are entrancing and as cinematic as the real-life Westerns that were filmed in the valley in which the book is primarily set. But what makes the novel soar is the way Wiggins can evoke landscapes both interior and exterior, especially the expansive valley that has come to exemplify America’s best qualities—and its worst.
This majestic novel will satisfy those thirsting for an epic saga of love, family, and the complexities of the American way.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7126-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
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