A fun and often intriguing tale of a military man unstuck in time.
A historical fantasy novel in which a Revolutionary War–era British soldier is thrown into a time-traveling adventure.
As Modlin’s latest novel opens in April 1775, British Army Sgt. Noland Black is rallying his troops to march on Lexington and Concord in the Colony of Massachusetts in order to seize rebel stores of guns and ammunition. On the return trip to Boston, rebels swarm out of the woods, and Black is wounded and loses consciousness. When he awakens, he’s still on the ground in Concord, but 200 years have passed, and it’s historical reenactors who are trying to give him first aid. Suddenly, Noland has to deal with the unfamiliar world of 1975, including cars, modern medicine, 20th-century modes of dress. He's aggressive and depressed at first (“I should not be here,” he thinks at one point. “I know of nothing I see”), while the history buffs who found him facedown and wounded set about investigating the amazing truth of his situation. Before long, his new friends show him more of the Boston environs, including a tour of Cambridge, all of which is a somber experience for Noland, who only wants to return home: “The place from where I came, and knew quite well, no longer exists.” Over the course of this novel, Modlin tightly orchestrates a familiar time-shift story, and his decision to make his protagonist gruff and irascible rather than wide-eyed gives the work a refreshing narrative focus: Noland is shown to be a tough veteran of many skirmishes but a good man at heart, even before the shots that sent him through time. The text itself has occasional, distracting slip-ups that might have been caught with a stronger edit (such as “Identifying the shears as a weapon and instrument that could destroy his regiment coat, Sergeant Black reached swung out his good arm”). However, readers will still find the story to be a strong one that provides rock-solid entertainment.
A fun and often intriguing tale of a military man unstuck in time.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780998542720
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
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
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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