A captivating maritime story, both subtle and dramatic.
A historical novel combines a personal drama among sailors on a naval ship with a navigational catastrophe.
In 1923, Eugene Dooman, secretary at the American Embassy in Tokyo, disembarks from the SS President Cleveland in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose Barbary Coast is “famed for sin and depravity from its earliest days.” Despite being a “worldy wise” man who has traveled widely, he’s robbed by swindling sailors who make off with his wallet, leaving him without money or identification. Serendipitously, he runs into Capt. Edward H. Watson, an old friend, who invites him aboard the USS Delphy, headed to San Diego. Watson promises to do his best to track down the miscreants who purloined Dooman’s wallet, apparently unaware that the gang is among his own crew. Meanwhile, Emmett Haines, the leader of the misfits, meets Ruby, who kindles in him a desire for something more: “I’m good at what I do. I’m good at separating a man from his money, at least in small amounts. But I get the feeling I could be good at something bigger. Something more important.” Ray and Vannier tantalizingly chronicle the way in which the Delphy becomes a dramatic tinderbox—Watson pursues the thieves, and Haines has a falling-out with the gang members. All the while, the ship, due to faulty navigation, heads toward an avoidable disaster. Based loosely on a real event—the ship calamity—the authors skillfully explore the dislocation of a sailor’s life, permanently unmoored and perpetually enticed by seedy temptations. In addition, the romantic spark between Haines and Ruby is electric—they seem to notice in each other both a casual indifference to conventional morality and a longing for a fuller life. As she puts it: “A grifter knows a grifter.”
A captivating maritime story, both subtle and dramatic.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-940776-06-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Baaa Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2020
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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