An enjoyable and enticing page-turner.
Burchard offers a modern take on the Arthurian legend in which a struggling Los Angeles–based actor finds herself in the court of Camelot.
It’s the year 2000, and Cassandra “Casey” Clemens, who’s about to turn 40, is dealing with a lot of bad news. First, she discovers that she’s being fired from her gig as the star of a series of cleaning product ads; then, when she tries to surprise her married boyfriend at the airport, she sees that his pregnant wife is already there. When she gets a moment alone with him, Casey decides to salvage some of her dignity by pretending she’s at the airport not to meet him but to fly to London for a new acting job. So off to London she goes, headed to a small town called Small Common, where she hopes to have zero human contact and recover at her leisure. However, after a freak horse-riding accident, she has a strange encounter with an even stranger man holding a bloody sword. Then she notices dead bodies around her, and it soon becomes clear that this isn’t Hollywood make-believe: She’s somehow been sent to Arthurian times. Now these odd soldiers have her in chains and a clear command to bring her to their king; it turns out that she’s a very important person in this time and place. Over the course of this novel, Burchard spins a fun fantasy tale. Narrator Casey has a narrative voice that’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny (“Running away from everything I knew wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, but it wasn’t the dumbest, either”), and the story in which she finds herself balances humor and action in a way that flows naturally. Casey is portrayed as just flawed enough to be relatable, and even in Arthurian times, she still reads as a real person that one would like to know. The supporting cast, both in modern and olden times, effectively allows Casey to shine more brightly.
An enjoyable and enticing page-turner.Pub Date: May 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780985883775
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Boz Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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