An ambitious, engaging novel that explores the power of finding personal connection to the past.
Stories, letters, and journals connect the tumultuous lives of several women in a single family over three centuries in this debut novel.
In a prologue set in 2014, Rachel Pearson Strand reflects on her mother’s enigmatic last words: “I am like Ana,” she says. “I have failed Juliana.” Those names, unfamiliar to Rachel, act as a springboard for D’Harlingue’s debut historical novel, which interweaves the lives of characters over multiple generations. In the first part, set in 1661 Madrid, Ana grieves her physician husband, Emilio Cardero Diaz, and helps her brother, also widowed, raise his 16-year-old daughter, Juliana, who’s never been told the truth about her mother’s death. The story unfolds in short, alternating chapters, each focusing on a different character, with many in diary or letter form. Ana discovers her late husband’s journal, which reveals his long-held desire to travel to the New World, and then finds Juliana’s diary, which she kept after she fled her childhood home. Her father had killed a man who’d raped her but then aimed to kill Juliana, as well, because he couldn’t bear the loss of “honor.” The book’s second part shifts to 1992, when Rachel, who’s pregnant, reveals to her dying mother that she’s about to have a girl. Rachel, who teaches Spanish at a university, later finds a packet of documents that continue Juliana’s story, including her escape to Mexico City and her life in a convent, which also shelters her daughter. D’Harlingue’s prose is languid and sure throughout this novel and especially effective at threading in intriguing details of 17th-century Spain and Mexico City, including the role of education in the lives of women. Ana, Juliana, and Rachel are all distinct characters, with Juliana’s journey the most compelling. However, the episodic, often epistolary plot structure somewhat slackens the tension and drama surrounding Juliana’s courageous life choices. The inclusion of each generation makes for a crowded closing section, as well. Nevertheless, the rhythms of these women’s lives are sure to resonate with readers.
An ambitious, engaging novel that explores the power of finding personal connection to the past.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-743-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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