A historically rigorous portrayal of a time of conflict, but that founders as literary drama.
In Miller’s historical novel, a young man is pulled into the Revolutionary War after his sibling is murdered.
In 1776, Josiah Hartford becomes a soldier “quite by accident” after his 16-year-old brother, Patrick, is killed by British soldiers invading Concord in the Massachusetts colony. He joins the Continental Army, bristling with a desire for revenge, and particularly distinguishes himself as a swordsman at Breed’s Hill. Josiah is a troubled man; he got a girl pregnant out of wedlock in Boston, and she subsequently died in childbirth. Later, both of his marriage proposals to another woman, Mercy Willingham, are summarily rejected. Meanwhile, his family is denounced as traitorous and sent to prison by his oldest friend, Hugo Chamberlain, a jealous rival who becomes a captain in the British Army. Josiah finds love again with another woman, Violet, but the relationship is fraught; she’s a sex worker with a checkered past—her mother and father were murdered by pirates, and she was sold into sexual slavery. Josiah is deeply drawn to her but also reluctant to fully commit to their relationship—a predicament depicted in blandly sentimental terms by author Miller, whose prose is earnest but anodyne: “The way Violet clung to him like she never wanted to let him go, the sweetness of her embrace when she gave herself to him, his own feelings of desire—these had a hold on him so strong that he wondered if anything could break it.”
Over the course of the novel, Miller displays a knowledge of the historical material that’s magisterial as he later presents an astute, as well as vivid, tableau of the war in New York, as well as the colony’s strategic significance. Also, his account of the role of Hessian mercenaries is rigorously researched, as is his treatment of the conditions of prisoners of war at the time. After Fort Washington is taken by the British, Josiah is captured and compelled to participate in a “savage, animalistic way of life” whose brutality the author portrays with a great deal of power. However, the book as whole is overly melodramatic; even the depiction of George Washington feels hyperbolic. Josiah is overawed when he first meets him: “He wondered if Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar had had this effect on people.” Likewise, dramatic speeches and declarations abound throughout the text, which feels like theatrical performance for a stage production, as when Josiah stands to his Hessian captors: “You crossed an ocean to fight in a war that has nothing to do with you. You butcher men who try to surrender. You loot and rape and burn. This country is going to swallow you up and spit you out, and you’ll never see your dear, civilized Fatherland again.” Furthermore, the plot is predictable, as it’s obvious from early on exactly how the novel will reach its dramatic crescendo and which two characters will be involved in it.
A historically rigorous portrayal of a time of conflict, but that founders as literary drama.Pub Date: March 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131623
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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