A vivid and entertaining war tale.
The opening salvos of the American Revolution come to life via this historical novel that follows the impact of the war on one Boston family caught in the maelstrom.
It is March 1775, and 21-year-old Josiah Hartford, the eldest of six siblings and a handsome, eligible Boston gentleman, is tired of engaging in the city’s most popular topic of conversation—will there be a war? His younger brother, Walter, a member of Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty, tells him the day will come when Josiah will be forced to choose between the king and the American patriots. Josiah scoffs at him. A recent Harvard graduate, he had hoped to continue his studies of the great Western philosophers for a postgraduate degree. Unfortunately, his father, Benjamin, is ill with a weak heart. Josiah has been summoned home to run Hartford Ships, the company his father built more than 30 years ago, now one of New England’s premium shipbuilders. British ships have been arriving in Boston Harbor bearing King George III’s military. Among them is British Lt. Hugo Chamberlain, Josiah’s dearest friend. Josiah has not seen him for four years, ever since Hugo’s father sent him to join the king’s army. But when the two men reunite at Castle Island, a Redcoat stronghold, Josiah realizes that Hugo, now an ardent advocate for the British Empire, has changed. This is the first crack in their friendship, and it signals the beginning of a series of tragic events that transform Josiah, the philosophical pacifist, into a fighting member of the rebel army. Through his eyes, readers witness the brutal battles of Lexington and Concord and later Bunker Hill (ironically fought on the neighboring Breed’s Hill). Miller’s narrative alternates between page-turning action and sections filled with personal and family drama—with a dose of melodrama. Josiah’s increasing complexity is in stark contrast to Hugo’s diminishment into an unsettling, flattened caricature, plagued by unrequited love, jealousy, and the need for revenge. But the author’s meticulous attention to atmospheric cultural details and descriptions of period weaponry add up to a narrative win. Readers will hope for a sequel.
A vivid and entertaining war tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68433-779-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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