A satisfying continuation of a historical epic.
A teenage girl explores the implications of her father’s life and work amid the social and political upheaval of 1950s Canada in this installment of Warren’s Centrewood Cycle.
In October 1957, Lois Michelsen and her parents, Graham and Emily, travel from their home in Centrewood, a planned community north of Toronto, to Niagara Falls so that Graham can investigate Lois’ vision of a Native American chief and dancing warriors that she experienced during a ceremony for the unveiling of the Avro Arrow aircraft; Graham is Avro’s chief aeronautical engineer. They meet with Chief Fred King of the New Credit First Nation Reserve of the Mississaugas, who confirms that Lois’ vision was of a Mississauga chief. Graham and Fred discuss an 1805 treaty agreement which resulted in the unjust sale of Mississauga land where the Avro plant was later built. Graham later brings up the claim with his colleagues at Avro, but before any action can be taken, agents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrive at the Michelsen home prepared to charge Lois’ parents as Communist sympathizers. Although the crisis is quickly averted, the Michelsen family faces another challenge when Eszter Molnar, the mother of Lois’ friend, Becky, asks Graham to act as executor of her estate and have her power of attorney. As the family contemplates the implications of the request, Emily continues to encourage Lois’ friendship with Mitsy Gardiner, another local girl; however, Mitsy’s troubled life leads to a tragedy that could change Lois’ life forever. Warren’s sequel to Once in a New Moon (2017) continues the story of Lois’ coming-of-age in Canada in the ’50s while expanding on the backstories and histories of significant supporting characters. Throughout, Lois continues to find her voice as an advocate for the First Nations Mississauga while dealing with the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, including coping with peer pressure. The story of Eszter’s past in Hungary and the circumstances of her immigration to Canada emerge as a compelling and multilayered subplot as her request becomes a source of concern for Graham and Emily in the second half of the novel. Mitsy, a supporting character in Once in a New Moon, is also a strong central character in this installment as Lois learns more about her friend’s family history and risky lifestyle. The book contains minor spelling inconsistencies in secondary characters’ names. Declan Callaghan, one of Mitsy’s friends, is referred to as both “Corky” and “Corkie,” and Mrs. Molnar’s first name is spelled “Ezster” and “Eszter.”
A satisfying continuation of a historical epic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4021-9
Page Count: 561
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 19, 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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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