Fun, intriguing, and packed with historical tidbits.
Rosenberg offers a fictionalized take on the life of Lily Bollinger, a real-life champagne magnate who took her family’s business to new heights.
Lily Bollinger was 42 years old in 1941 when her husband of 20 years, Jacques Bollinger, head of the family’s champagne business, died. It was left to her to take over management of the prestigious winery. The novel opens in 1967, with Lily about to make a major announcement about a bold new addition to the Bollinger portfolio: the “Bollinger R.D.,” a daring blend of tradition and creative innovation. But first, she must endure an interview with Cyril Ray, the newly appointed and officious wine critic from The Observer, a man who becomes her major irritant over the following years. (“Trying to explain the brilliance of ‘recently disgorged’ to Cyril Ray feels akin to attempting to teach a cat to waltz.”) For Lily, the past two and a half decades have been defined by grief, determination, courage, and rebellion in the face of the Nazi onslaught and various court battles. It has also been a time filled with the excitement and elegance of spectacular promotional events that included such glamorous figures as race car drivers and a couple of very special movie stars. As she begins to look ahead toward her future retirement, she has one more unique vintage planned—but it will remain a family secret until her 75th birthday celebration, still seven years away. Rosenberg’s novel toggles back and forth through time, beginning with Jacques’ death and proceeding to Lily’s ultimate success. The prose is lively, replete with delightful repartee and a smattering of French phrases. For those whose acquaintance with champagne is limited to the occasional celebratory indulgence, the novel will be an eye-opening cornucopia of complex details—perhaps a bit too many for the casual reader. Still, Rosenberg’s Lily is a vibrant, potent mix of grit and glitz, with her love of the land and her amusing fondness for all things James Bond. A secret multidecade romance adds extra dash to her character.
Fun, intriguing, and packed with historical tidbits.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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