A movingly written historical novel with an unforgettable hero in Sadie Briar.
Litton’s novel introduces readers to Sadie Briar, whose life begins with Native American raids and ends with orbiting astronauts.
Protagonist Sadie Briar was born in north-central Kansas in 1869 and dies there in 1968, never having traveled outside the county. It’s a hard existence (“In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted”), but the Briars are hard workers and prosper despite what the fates and Kansas weather throw at them. She falls in love with the ardent (and handsome) Populist newspaper editor Hagan Corbett, and they have a son, Danny. Hagan dies and Sadie marries his best friend, the larger-than-life Maxie Ross. They have a daughter, Hannah. We’ll stop the plot summary there so as not to risk more spoilers, but the framing device should be noted: The bulk of the story consists of Sadie’s recollections as she and her grandson Paul, a “gentle giant” with an intellectual disability, are celebrating Christmas in 1968. People are born and people die in the march of time, to the tune of Reconstruction, the Populist era, World War I, the Depression, and World War II. Litton is a published writer, both in fiction and poetry. Here his prose toys with a sophisticated poetic style that could easily become stiff and mannered, a quirk—but he keeps things in bounds. Generally the prose is good, and readers get a hefty dose of the elegiac, with Sadie ruminating on her life and her mortality. (Sadie’s “old body [had] shrunk to a skin sack, nearly emptied out.”) The opening of the book, a brutal Native American attack that leaves Sadie’s aunt, uncle, and three cousins dead, is an attention grabber. That same raiding party also attacks the Briars’ place, but Sadie’s mother offers a litter of kittens in exchange for her daughter, and the offer is accepted. Life, we sense, can be extremely capricious.
A movingly written historical novel with an unforgettable hero in Sadie Briar.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798218773281
Page Count: 377
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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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