This love story is witty, bittersweet, surprising, and compellingly readable.
A fantasy novelist reimagines the myth of Dionysus.
Pulley’s intricately plotted fantasy novels have explored the past couple hundred years, the near(ish) future, and alternate versions of both. In her new novel, she goes back millennia further to Bronze Age Thebes. The protagonist, Phaidros, is one of the Sown, an elite fighting force named after knights said to have sprouted from a dragon’s teeth. The Sown are organized in pairs: a commander and his ward, whom he raises and trains, then sometimes marries. (Married couples and devoted family pairs will fight like the gods to keep each other alive, the thinking goes.) Phaidros’ commander is Helios, a royal prince. When Queen Agave, Helios’ sister, tries to kill their other sister’s blue-eyed baby nephew (said to be a son of Zeus, but that’s what people always say about illegitimate children), 5-year-old Phaidros helps Helios whisk the entrancing baby away to safety. Years later, Phaidros encounters a blue-eyed adolescent who turns sailors into dolphins, and then—years later yet—a blue-eyed man named Dionysus who makes fruit and vines grow in the middle of a drought. Are they the same person? Is this the illegitimate prince come back for revenge? Is his father really Zeus, after all? Is he a god himself, or just an ordinary witch (a magical healer)? Is it safe for Phaidros to love him? Must Phaidros choose between compassion and duty—and will he choose right? Pulley brings out her favorite elements—palace intrigue, gallant lovers, masks, transformations, ambiguity, automata—and twists them into mesmerizing patterns. Though she draws extensively on mythological source material, the novel feels more like fantasy than the myth-come-to-life realism of retellings such as those by Madeline Miller.
This love story is witty, bittersweet, surprising, and compellingly readable.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781639732364
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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