Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity.Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity.
British author Gray lays bare the horrors of World War I through an Englishwoman’s battlefield search for her fiance.
Before the war, music teacher Edward Haslam and Amy Vanneck fall in love and become secretly engaged, although he is beneath her class, socially a nobody. He hates war, which “poisons everything that it does not destroy,” yet he answers England’s call and becomes a captain of the Seventh Manchesters. Of course, the lovers exchange letters. Then, in early 1919, when the war is newly over, English soldiers must scour the battlefields of northern France to identify rat-eaten corpses and properly bury them. It’s a gruesome, smelly, necessary task. Edward is among the missing, and Amy decides to travel to France to search for him on her own, well aware that he is most likely dead. In a hospital, a wounded soldier tells her to “look for your damned sweetheart” under Two Storm Wood. That’s the label on army maps for a former German stronghold, under which lies a vast network of tunnels packed with explosives and teeming with rats. The army dismisses rumors that deserters are hiding there and that someone may have murdered a group of noncombatant Chinese laborers. There’s no hint of irony here: only horror at the possibility of murder while surrounded by nations’ organized killings. Amy is determined to know Edward’s fate for better or worse. This, to her, is what it means to be in love—to find her man dead or alive, deserter or not. But there are those who don’t want her to know a dark secret about Two Storm Wood, and they are willing to kill. Combat creates Edward's dramatic arc from “the lover, the music teacher” to “the expert close-quarter killer” who sneaks up to enemy trenches and slits throats with a knuckle knife. The scenes of death are unsparing in their grimness, but nothing will stop Amy Vanneck.
Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity.Powerful historical fiction and a testament to war’s insanity.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-54188-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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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