A vividly drawn period piece about violence and race in America.
Two kids living in the Bronx grow up in an era dominated by drugs, racial tension, and the Vietnam War in this novel.
Jaylen Jackson and his brother, Jamani, are swept out of the Jim Crow South by their mother, Tyra, after their father disappears. Jimmy O’Farrell’s father, Matthew, moves his family to New York City from Ireland, hoping to become part of America’s immigration legacy. Both Jaylen and Jimmy find a home in the Bronx, yet outside their passion for basketball, they have remarkably different experiences there and only cross paths on “The Courts.” Jimmy feels comfortable in the heavily Irish community, but after a violent gang attack takes a friend’s life, he is ill at ease around the Black and Hispanic families in New York’s melting pot. Jaylen, meanwhile, discovers that while the “Whites Only” signs of Mississippi are long gone, his skin color still matters, and he eventually leaves college to join the Marines, an institution that promises a life beyond such prejudice. But this is the 1960s, and the Vietnam War rages, and even for an accomplished soldier, there is no real equality to be unearthed in the Asian jungles. What he does find, surprisingly, is Jimmy, now a Marine himself and happy to see a familiar face from the Bronx. When both are wounded, a chance encounter on the USS Sanctuary gives Jaylen a blunt moment to peel back the racial facade that separates them, a revelation that will shape the two men’s decisions after returning home. Coffino employs an understandable language in the novel’s action scenes, particularly on the basketball court and with other team sports. Even Jimmy and his family’s listening to the 1960s World Series is exciting and high stakes. New York comes alive in the book, a place of great history and infinite possibility, with people of all races and creeds constantly in both cooperation and conflict. Vietnam is deftly captured as a carnal, violent place, and the only setting that comes up short in the story is its portrayal of Jim Crow Mississippi, its communities, perhaps rightfully, taking a back seat to its vile politics. Dreams, folklore, and Bible verses foreshadow events and outline characters’ anxieties, connecting them beyond race and through a shared culture and experiences.
A vividly drawn period piece about violence and race in America.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64663-350-0
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2021
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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