An engaging, meditative, globe-trotting tale that ultimately reinforces the presence of spiritual forces.
In this novel, a billionaire widower, angry that religion didn’t save his cancer-stricken wife, recruits a teenage Indian girl to test the truth of spiritual revelation.
In Paris, Michael Sergeant asks Professor Dufort, the “world’s leading expert on the critique of religion,” how the “age of faith” can be ended. Michael desires this due to the death of his wife, Celeste, whom he met when he was her private-jet pilot. When Celeste was diagnosed with cancer, the couple explored various faith systems: Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and others. By the time they got to Islam, Michael’s hope in faith had faded, and Celeste soon died in a hospital. While Dufort tells him that “all the money in the world will not fund enough research to bring down religion,” Michael, now “heir to over a billion pounds,” decides to set up someone in the same circumstances that led Muhammad to have a spiritual revelation in a cave. Michael, working with various helpers, brings 17-year-old Hamida Begum, an orphan living in India with her grandmother, to his estate in Cumbria. A nearby cave is prepared, but Hamida first travels with Maurice Dufort, the professor’s researcher nephew, whom Michael has hired to educate and seduce her. Hamida’s grandmother always told her that she had a special destiny as a descendant of the Mughal imperial line. Now, the teen starts to experience more of the world as well as her own mystical powers. Then her time in the cave produces a “result” that surprisingly reconnects Michael to Celeste. Imady packs a lot of destinations and historical/religious threads into this ambitious novel. This makes for somewhat dizzying reading at times, although the book will pique readers’ interest to learn more about the Mughal Empire. Some of the story’s mechanics are fuzzy—how do Michael’s helpers come to pick Hamida, and were they fully aware of her special qualities? Still, the tale’s core—Hamida and Maurice connecting—is a rather sweet and touching romance, a reflection of the overriding power of love that is the engrossing story’s overall message.
An engaging, meditative, globe-trotting tale that ultimately reinforces the presence of spiritual forces.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2022
ISBN: 9781940178592
Page Count: 303
Publisher: VILLA MAGNA PUBLISHING
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2022
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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