An effective and engaging legal tale about the trial of an abused wife.
A debut courtroom novel focuses on a murder case based on a true story.
Bob Nichols, the narrator of Steadman’s book, opens this tale while sitting on his deck in Flint, Michigan, in 1987. He’s thinking back to the case that made his career back in October 1956, when his old high school sweetheart, Betty, walked into the offices of his fledgling law practice in the town of Darien with a horrifying confession: She killed her husband, Sam Waterman. Nichols had been on the same football team as Sam when they were younger, and he was extremely familiar with the rocky state of Betty’s marriage. Sam “had brutalized her during the last three years of their marriage,” he recalls, “with the full knowledge and support of his dad, Ira.” Fearing for her own life and the safety of her little daughter, Betty had drawn a shotgun from underneath Sam’s bed and shot him dead while he slept. Nichols knew instantly that he had a “cause” case on his hands—and also an uphill battle to make the argument that Betty was acting in self-defense even though her victim was asleep when she killed him. As the trial got under way and the witnesses and publicity began turning Betty’s already unhappy life upside down, tender feelings began to rekindle between Nichols and his client. Steadman, who was the defense attorney in the real-world trial, works all of these elements into a narrative that positively crackles with authenticity. Through his main character’s reflections on events in Darien, Steadman captures perfectly many of the aspects of small-town living, where everybody went to the same high school and knows one another’s business. And through the slow, step-by-step dramatization of the trial, the author wonderfully elicits the workaday, real-world lessons of a career in the law. Steadman deftly escalates the drama both inside and outside the courtroom, and the display of his legal skills in the former setting neatly counterbalances the simple sweetness of how he handles the latter.
An effective and engaging legal tale about the trial of an abused wife.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-954786-52-3
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2022
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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