A well-rendered examination of the Vietnam War on the home front.
Two young cousins struggle to maintain their close relationship despite their opposing views of the Vietnam War in Black-Gould and Hardiman’s novel.
Cate is your typical Jersey City high school senior and peace lover, and what a time to be one: The year is 1969, and war is raging in Vietnam. As TV news brings the carnage of battle into American homes for the first time, national support for the war is plummeting. Nevertheless, Cate’s cousin, Albie, is as gung-ho about becoming a soldier as he’s ever been. Albie is the kind of kid who grew up playing make-believe war, gorging himself on the battlefield heroics of his parents’ generation, the soldiers who returned from World War II victorious, if damaged. Despite overwhelming protestations from his entire family, Albie enlists in the military right after high school graduation, all but guaranteeing a ticket to the front lines overseas. Cate, shattered and made furious by his decision, must attempt to move forward with her life. She knows she wants to flee her small town for the big city, and though she dreams of life in New York City’s Greenwich Village, she can’t quite afford it, stuck as she is in a menial typing job. Though Cate’s mother’s dream is for her daughter to become one of the glamorous, eligible bachelorettes in the secretarial pool, Cate is miserable in that environment from the start: “The doors parted to the clatter of typewriters and sour smell of smoke—and yelling. A tall woman, dressed in black…berated a typist cowering in her seat.” Cate’s distaste for regimentation is evident from an early age, as readers see in chapters that flash back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Cate was a rebellious asker of questions (qualities not appreciated in her strict Catholic school), and Albie always tried to protect her out of love, drawing attention away from her back to himself.
The manner in which readers’ perception of the characters’ relationship grows in concert with Cate and Albie’s coming of age works well, providing important context that allows the forthcoming tragedies to hit home. While navigating the city, Cate makes a friend whose writing explores the suffering of Vietnam veterans, opening Cate’s eyes to another side of the war and helping her to see what those very same soldiers she resents might be going through. Novels about the Vietnam War have become commonplace, but Black-Gould and Hardiman’s work manages to carve out territory that feels contemporary by not shying away from issues that resonate today—including the treatment of LGBTQ+ people and the divisiveness a war can foment within a country—which are as relevant right now as they ever were. Though this novel may not be groundbreaking relative to other accounts of the conflict, it does succeed in presenting characters who are memorable enough to keep readers engaged throughout the story and beyond the final page. Cate, in particular, travels an arc that satisfies both in its literary aims and its emotional resonance.
A well-rendered examination of the Vietnam War on the home front.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798990328600
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Green Grotto Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
