A rich, original, and engrossing drama featuring a remarkably engaging hero.
Romance, adventure, and danger attend the travels of a British Portuguese teenage girl in this literary historical novel.
Sofia-Elisabete Fitzwilliam made her first appearance in I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam (2018), recounting her experiences as a 5-year-old in 1815. The girl’s mother, Doña Marisa, who’d abandoned her in a convent years ago, stole her away from England and her father, Col. Fitzwilliam (the poor cousin of Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). After some time, her father tracked her down, and Sofia-Elisabete’s parents agreed to take turns raising her. But when she was 11 and ready to return to England, her father never showed up. In this sequel, it’s 1825, and Sofia-Elisabete, almost 15, feels stifled by her authoritarian stepfather, Don Rafael, and the expectations that young Spanish women be pious, pure, and think only of marriage and babies. Further, Sofia-Elisabete longs to experience the passion of love—in a country where women don’t allow men even to touch their hands. When her flirtation with handsome bolero dancer Antonio de Silva goes too far, she is sent posthaste to her beloved grandfather in Cádiz. There, Antonio is soon eclipsed by Kitt Munro, a 20-year-old Scottish student traveling as a research assistant. Sofia-Elisabete is bewitched by his intelligence, good manners, and freckles, and he’s equally enamored. But their burgeoning romance is interrupted when Kitt is called home to Scotland, leaving Sofia-Elisabete to deal with her cash-strapped family’s insistence that she marry a rich, thoroughly loathsome older man. She manages to escape and makes a long and dangerous journey toward Britain, experiencing such misadventures on the way that she loses her wits. Kitt finds and rescues her, but that isn’t the last of their struggles. Grueling travel, reported deaths, amnesia, injury, and separation stand between Sofia-Elisabete and the fulfillment of her dreams.
In this volume, Kobayashi develops her charming child hero into a thoughtful, passionate, and equally delightful teenager. While she’s a typical adolescent in her impatience to burst through restrictive bonds and experience life, Sofia-Elisabete exhibits insightful maturity, as when she reflects on the accusation that she’s lazy, pampered, and spoiled and admits she has been selfish and desperate to get her own way. She also has a wonderfully lyrical imagination, as when she plays the harp for Kitt and fantasizes about drifting down a river to a marsh, where he becomes a swallow: “A balmy breeze swept us to sea, and so, I raised high my mantilla to make a sail, guiding us into the bay of Cádiz, past the tangle of ship masts, past the naked sea-bathers, past the urchins angling for St. Peter’s fishes. Mr. Munro fluttered his wings and he settled upon my shoulder, to sing tenderly in my ear.” The complicated plot’s melodrama is balanced with humor, poignancy, and moments of magical realism, particularly when Kitt disappears and Sofia-Elisabete searches for him in the haunted islands of the Inner Hebrides.
A rich, original, and engrossing drama featuring a remarkably engaging hero.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7367866-0-4
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
