A colorful but uneven venture into historical fiction.
The veteran spy novelist indulges what he calls an “obsession” with Leon Trotsky to imagine the Russian’s brief New York sojourn.
Born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, Trotsky took his better-known name from one of his prison guards. Littell mentions in a foreword that his own father was born Leon Litzky, but he had the surname legally changed in 1919 to Littell because of its resemblance to the infamous revolutionary’s nom de guerre. This nominal link is why, the novelist says, he “couldn’t resist fantasizing” about Trotsky’s 10 weeks in New York just before the 1917 revolution erupted. Trotsky sails with his longtime companion and their two sons in early 1917 to New York, where his fame has preceded him. J. Edgar Hoover conducts his immigration interview, a likely anachronism, and the press greets him on the pier. Trotsky moves into an apartment in the Bronx and begins writing for the Russian-language newspaper Novy Mir and the Jewish Daily Forward. He begins an affair with a journalist named Frederika Fedora, who has ties through her father to Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. He gives speeches and argues with various emigres and sympathizers, including Nikolai Bukharin and Eugene Debs. The average reader might be mystified by the factional nuance and rhetoric that emerge among committed Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks. The U.S. visit comes to an end when the czar abdicates and Trotsky feels he must return to a Russia where revolution has begun again. While the historical characters are little more than foils and talking heads, Littell creates a well-rounded personality in Trotsky. Some of the character development derives from his highly active and vocal conscience, whose contrarian bent constantly tests the man’s convictions and assertions. And note that Trotsky associates his conscience with a “childhood nemesis” named Leon Litzky—which may make sense if you’re fantasizing about an obsession.
A colorful but uneven venture into historical fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781641296861
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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