An overly schematic approach to what could have been a fascinating retelling of history.
Beanland imagines how the devastating Richmond Theater fire, which killed 72 people on December 26, 1811, impacted several survivors, some more fictionalized than others.
The novel, which faithfully follows the recorded facts, begins backstage at the theater, where a teenage stagehand raises a chandelier lit with candles that sets the scenery on fire. Soon theatergoers are rushing to escape. Patrick Henry’s daughter Sally Henry Campbell, at the time a 31-year-old widow, selflessly saves those around her before jumping from a window. While nursing wounded survivors over the next few days, she learns that men she knew deliberately trampled over women to get to the stairs, and she concludes that White men of her privileged class are morally bankrupt in their behavior toward both White women and enslaved Black people. While Sally is trapped inside the theater, Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith who has secretly learned to read and write, stands outside catching women who jump. While Gilbert is touted as a hero and one of the women he saved raises money to pay for his manumission, the theater company, afraid to take the blame itself, spreads rumors pinning responsibility for the fire on a “slave rebellion.” (The actual Gilbert, though also lauded, actually purchased his freedom years later.) Soon the slave patrol, headed by Gilbert’s owner, is rounding up Black people. Meanwhile, Gilbert’s niece Cecily Patterson decides that the fire, specifically all the bodies burned beyond recognition, might spell freedom if her owners believe she died. Beanland adeptly jumps among the characters’ stories and delights in conveying details of everyday life in 1811 Virginia. But she's heavy-handed in using the story to emphasize the evils of slavery, racism, and sexism. Locked within the author’s political message, characters like the progressive Sally, saintly Gilbert, and a variety of evil White men lack dimension. Only the young stagehand Jack Gibson is allowed to express the human complexity of moral decision-making as his sense of right conflicts with loyalty to his theatrical family.
An overly schematic approach to what could have been a fascinating retelling of history.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781982186142
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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