An engaging but twistingly tangent-prone narrative of an overlooked corner of American frontier history.
A young woman braves war, murder, and a failed marriage in the 19th-century American West.
In the 1850s and 1860s, young Emma Thompson travels with her parents across the western United States and into the Utah Territory, where they fall under the sway of a self-declared prophet known as Joseph Morris, who’s left Mormonism to found his own sect, known as the Morrisites. Hailed as the “Lord of the Earth” and the Messiah, Morris encourages his followers to abandon their vocations and prepare for the imminent physical return of Jesus. His boasts draw the attention of the territorial government, which dispatches Deputy Marshal Robert Burton to restore order. In a bloody skirmish later known as the Morrisite War, Burton’s men besiege the Morrisites’ fort. A cannonball strikes Emma’s friend Mary Christofferson, shattering her chin. Emma watches in horror as a man she identifies as Burton fires upon Joseph Morris and Isabella Bowman, killing them instantly. Outraged by this apparent miscarriage of justice, Emma awaits the day their killer will be apprehended. After the war ends, still in her teens, Emma marries a soldier named George Waldron—although, as his lies and gambling debts accumulate, she’ll come to wonder if that’s actually his real name. When George is jailed for horse theft, Emma meets personally with a general and secures his release. When their marriage flounders, Emma divorces George and marries Nels Just, for reasons more pragmatic than romantic.
Just’s narrative is drawn from the journals of Emma Just, a blood relation, and memories shared orally with her daughter Agnes. At times in the journals, Emma alludes only vaguely to events of which we have no further knowledge; reading between the gaps in the text, Just has attempted to reconstruct what might have taken place, based on informed speculation. (While the real George was arrested for horse theft, how he escaped the jail remains a mystery; the answer Just offers is both persuasive and lends the fictional Emma some much-needed agency.) Where Just excels is in portraying the minutiae of daily life in the West during this era: the drying of stirring spoons, the making of soap and candles from tallow, the price of cows, the effects of frost on crops and gardens. He skillfully renders Emma’s relationship with George; her naïveté and youthful eagerness to be seduced by a man of low character may remind readers of the title character in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1929), who also acquires wisdom in a failed marriage. In one of the book’s more compelling scenes, Emma, slightly crazed by isolation on the frontier, attempts to drown her sons in a river to save them from being murdered by Native Americans. Psychologically, the scene is perhaps the most believable moment in the book: small wonder that it’s taken from the real Emma’s diaries. The love of literature displayed by Emma’s sons—who, without formal schooling, grow up reading classic novels—sounds a plangent note for the vanished mass literacy of a previous century.
An engaging but twistingly tangent-prone narrative of an overlooked corner of American frontier history.Pub Date: July 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2026
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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