Packed with history, intrigue, and social controversy, along with well-crafted action scenes.
Quaver’s fifth volume in his The Ordeals of Elly Robin series brings his irrepressible protagonist to Chicago just before America’s entry into World War I.
It’s 1915, and teen prodigy Elly Robin, 15, has driven her Stanley Steamer motorcar from New Orleans to Chicago to study with piano virtuoso Maestro Vitorio Bellini. During a concert engagement in New Orleans, Bellini discovered Elly while she was the piano player in a bordello he was visiting. Impressed by the young girl’s exceptional skill on the keyboard, and seriously inebriated, he offered to be her mentor should she ever come to Chicago. Bellini’s sister, with whom he lives, arranges for Lillian LaSalle, wife of wealthy clothing manufacturer Franklin LaSalle, to be Elly’s patron. Lillian is to be responsible for instructing the socially awkward Elly in the social graces, necessary if she is to become a world-famous pianist, while Bellini schools her in the musical subtleties of the great classical composers. Elly—orphaned at 6 during the San Francisco earthquake and left to her own devices after fleeing an abusive children’s asylum—enters the LaSalle mansion and finds herself surrounded by unimagined luxury. The LaSalle children, especially Wilhelmina (“Willy”), treat her with hostility. But, as Elly learns, beneath the glittering exterior, the LaSalle family harbors dark secrets, mysteries that our young hero, who always keeps a sheathed stiletto hidden in her bodice, plans to unearth. Elly has her own secrets, a past she must keep hidden if she is to succeed within society. When Lillian hires tutor Carrie Gunther to teach Elly the foreign languages she’ll need for world tours, she unwittingly brings a rebel into the LaSalle household, someone who will expose Elly to the burgeoning labor movement plus a group of Anarchists, an association that puts Elly’s position, and possibly even her life, in danger.
Although followers of the series will know Elly’s backstory, those new to the saga must wait patiently for the details to be revealed gradually, especially when significant characters from her past reappear in the current volume. Quaver, a retired professional pianist, adeptly portrays the power of music to transport both artist and audience. Readers unfamiliar with the classical music references will still feel the intensity of Elly’s performances, although Quaver compromises the impact with too much repetition. As the author cautions in his opening notes, dialogue reflects the linguistics of the period, including offensive racial and ethnic slurs. These choices contribute to a realistic rendering of Chicago’s economic, social, and ethnic diversity and tensions in the early 20th century. The novel seamlessly blends historical figures and fictional characters. For example, Elly’s interactions with an aging and alcoholic Jack London and a fiery Emma Goldman add spice to the narrative. Her romantic liaison with Edwin Friend, aviation enthusiast and one of society’s most eligible bachelors, supplies poignancy and a bit of humor in a tale that culminates with a breathless, page-turning chase through the streets of Chicago, leading Elly straight into the next installment of this continuing saga. Quaver’s black-and-white drawings accompany the text.
Packed with history, intrigue, and social controversy, along with well-crafted action scenes.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 9798526346214
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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