A sometimes bleak but wholly absorbing coming-of-age story.
A girl overcomes a harsh upbringing and vows to make something of herself in Burgess’ series prequel.
Five-year-old Roxy Reid and her mother, Isadora, live in poverty in London’s East End. Isadora earns money as a sex worker but mostly uses it to feed her drug habit. She’s an angry woman who vents her frustrations by physically abusing her daughter. Roxy finds most of Isadora’s regulars to be seedy types, but Nick Dredd shows both Isadora and Roxy nothing but kindness. Nick ultimately takes Roxy in, giving her a better place to live, teaching her how to fight, and making her a part of his growing drug-dealing business. When she’s a bit older, she becomes a courier—both as a legitimate bike messenger and as a drug transporter. As a result, she’s often surrounded by reprehensible people, including Nick’s local rivals and Russian criminals muscling their way into Nick’s territory. Roxy ably holds her own but looks for an above-board career; she finally scores a job as an administrative assistant at a major American bank’s London office. Enter James Hancock, an American who’s just transferred there as head of fixed income trading; Roxy quickly sees him as her “meal ticket” out of the life she’s stuck in. But initiating a sexual relationship with him only complicates things, as James is married and most also likely sleeping with Roxy’s boss—who’s married as well. The longer she stays in London, the greater her chances of running into unsavory types from her recent past, whether they’re assorted criminals or simply men who remain irate that Roxy rejected their advances with her fists.
Burgess, whose last series entry was Roxy Reid: Five Weeks in New York(2021), excels at developing this prequel’s multilayered cast. Roxy has a complicated relationship with her abusive mother who repeatedly acknowledges her faults but seems incapable of rectifying her behavior. Nick is a mentor and warmhearted parental figure, which makes for a stark contrast with his criminal behavior, and although James may be the “protector” Roxy yearns for, he generally comes across as a pushover. The story’s pacing is impeccable, smoothly moving through the years until young Roxy reaches adulthood. Although it sticks to Roxy’s perspective, her ever-changing life propels her to different homes, various ways of making money, and into a host of other characters’ lives. With so many lawbreakers, it won’t surprise readers that this book has several dark and violent turns; fortunately, Burgess doesn’t steep the story in gloominess and only implies much of the violence, especially during Roxy’s earliest years. The protagonist as an adult is tough and ultra-chic, riding a motorcycle, sporting a leather messenger bag, and carrying her trusty switchblade and brass knuckles wherever she goes. In one scene, after a scuffle (that she wins), the author effectively describes her as wearing “her leather-Lycra fingerless gloves, and there was blood on them, though it was beginning to dry….Her knuckles were raw, with red, black, and blue bruising.” The ending perfectly sets up the next chronological installment.
A sometimes bleak but wholly absorbing coming-of-age story.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 979-8854434607
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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