A unique journey into 18th-century French history with a hero that readers cannot help but root for.
Flinn’s historical novella, the first in a series, explores the choices and wishes of a young, free Black woman in 18th-century France.
In Burgundy, France, in the year 1788, Véronique Clair is 23 years old and a worry to her parents. Desperate to see her married and her future secured, Véronique’s father travels to nearby areas of the country to find a suitable match for his daughter. Though it is the wish of her parents—her father, born into enslavement in Saint Dominque, now free, and her free Black mother, born in France—that she find a husband, Véronique is not so sure. She works as a servant, or domestique, but she wonders if she might find opportunities through work instead, especially given her talent for making clothes; she would prefer to marry for love rather than for convenience (“I thought about what I’d just seen in church and what I’d been seeing over the years. All my childhood girlfriends were married but, as the years rolled by, they weren’t setting a good example for why I should be”). The author highlights the limited options available to the less-wealthy women of 18th-century French society, particularly Black women working as servants, with Véronique’s first-person narration soberly relating to the reader that all “women servants were prey but black women even more so.” This is an impressively researched novella, though it also feels very abbreviated and the prose can be a little terse in its description of events. Despite this, Flinn manages to situate her hero effectively throughout the swift progression of the plot, which sees Véronique, threatened with ruin due to a lustful guest of her employer, enter the household of the rich noblewoman Martin, who seems to be the key to Véronique figuring out her future. The brief text leaves the reader wishing for more and anticipating an exciting and highly original series.
A unique journey into 18th-century French history with a hero that readers cannot help but root for.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 9798986060019
Page Count: 78
Publisher: Gilded Orange Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2023
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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