A memorable, impeccably written tale that engages the reader, with its twists and turns, from beginning to end.
A smartly imagined Western with a different sort of hero.
“Time seemed to slow as June witnessed his death—saw the blood upon his shirt, his wound like a water pump given one weak draw, a small breath let free before a full flow that drenched his entire chest and face.” In a sense, Harris’ latest is a rejoinder to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), with plenty of bloodshed and a villain who’s Holden and Glanton all rolled up into one. Coleman is a young New Orleanian who, newly emancipated, still works as a servant in the household he grew up in. The paterfamilias, Wyatt Harper, has taken off for the desert of northern Mexico, then under French rule, in the hope of finding his fortune building a railroad; he has taken Coleman’s sister, June, with him, and with evident intent for her to do more than keep house. June escapes, falling in with a guerrilla band made up of Black and Native American men and women. Resourceful and smart, she fits right in, but now Harper is on the hunt for her, employing a grandiloquent ruffian to bring Coleman to him in order to persuade June to return. Misadventures ensue, with Coleman, shy and bookish, slowly discovering that he, too, is not without inner strength. Harris’ characters are fully realized, and while some are familiar types, such as a sharp-tongued woman who could be an understudy for Mattie Ross from True Grit, most are freshly cast. A nice touch is Coleman’s attachment to the Harper family dog, who plays a strong role in the proceedings. To top off a skillfully constructed plot, Harris has a gift for vivid imagery (“The sun loomed overhead like a penny spat clean”) and period language (“We thieved—we killed, yes—but who in this day and age, forced into such dark corners of this world, might not?”).
A memorable, impeccably written tale that engages the reader, with its twists and turns, from beginning to end.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780316456241
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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