Stripped-down language and propulsive storytelling keep these pages turning.
A rugged debut novel about a young man fleeing from a violent life.
The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was a (real-life) vicious, predatory outfit dedicated to stamping out unions at the barrel of a gun. In this captivating debut novel we meet Jude Washer, a lost 24-year-old West Virginian who joined the group for all the wrong reasons (as if there could be right reasons). The year is 1922. Jude’s father had been a mean drunk and coal miner who pushed Jude’s 10-year-old brother to an early death. He was also a union organizer, and Jude, bent on not just destroying his dad but scorching the very earth he stood on, learned to see red when he saw unions. The problem is, Jude also has a soul, even though he tries to drown it with moonshine from his flask, and the Baldwin-Felts, generally speaking, do not. The book has some wonderfully chilling set pieces, including a horrific raid on a mining camp full of workers who are perfectly willing to shoot back. This is where Harvey Morgan, a new recruit Jude is training, decides he’s had enough, and Jude must decide if he’ll continue down his bloodstained path or look for something resembling atonement. This fork in the road is neither broad nor simple; the author tells her story through small actions and stripped-down language, building momentum one page at a time and foregoing big gestures. Her descriptions of the rugged land of the Blue Ridge Mountains ground the action in detail, carved out word by word. You care for Jude, a decent man doing the wrong thing, and when he flees his murderous colleagues with a badly wounded Harvey, you wants a new life for him, even when you know it won’t be easy and there’s a price to pay for past sins. This is rugged writing with a moral compass and a tarnished hero slowly trying to come clean.
Stripped-down language and propulsive storytelling keep these pages turning.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-938235-84-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
