An unevenly executed tale of injustice, bravery, and morality.
As the Civil War wanes, a reckless Southern sailor attempts to steal Confederate treasure in Smith’s historical novel.
By 1865, Confederate Navy midshipman Yancey Arvindale is disillusioned by the war. His crew is tasked with guarding a loaded train traveling from Richmond, Virginia, to Abbeville, South Carolina, on barely functional tracks. The trip is part of the real-life historical record, but the train’s inventory and its dispersal have long been open to speculation. In this novel, Arvindale determines that the Confederate treasury belonged to no one: “If the South was beaten and the Confederacy ceased to exist, who owned it?” In breathtaking episodes, the sailor manages to offload containers filled with gold, bury them alongside the tracks, and return to the train. In another plotline, a young Black woman named Ellie has escaped the plantation where she was enslaved after she and members of her family suffered horrible abuses. While attempting to find safe passage North, she encounters friends and foes, and Smith reveals her boldness along the way. Ellie’s and Arvindale’s paths inevitably intersect. The third plotline occurs in present-day Michigan, where billionaire Jonas Arvin attempts to track the elusive source of his family’s fortune. Overall, the author’s comprehensive knowledge of the Civil War and its aftermath lends depth and texture to a high-stakes, well-paced adventure saga. Some portions of Ellie’s story comprise the book’s weakest moments, though. The author is extremely adept at telling a compelling story about a disenchanted, amoral Confederate soldier. He’s on much shakier ground when attempting to portray people of color in this setting, and some scenes lack verisimilitude. For example, Ellie, who’s been enslaved her whole life and has never witnessed a transaction involving money, realizes in her very first cash encounter that she’s being overcharged. After the overcharger uses a racist slur, Yancey asks Ellie how the term made her feel, and she blithely responds, “Aw, nothin’,” because, she says, everyone calls Black people that. Ellie also builds a successful business without any resources and kills multiple people without any repercussions. In addition, the novel’s ending feels contrived and somewhat problematic.
An unevenly executed tale of injustice, bravery, and morality.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-68-495373-6
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 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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