An intriguing, enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.
In this novel, a baseball legend finds himself in the present day.
In the opening scene of Colton’s series opener, a tense baseball game is in progress. It won’t take readers long to figure out the game actually happened a century ago. And sure enough, Ty Cobb, the star of the Detroit Tigers, soon makes an appearance. After the game, the story’s action shifts to the present, with a man named Chase Ripley staggering drunk out onto the sidewalk at a bar’s closing time. The former college baseball prodigy is reeling from the death of his imperious father (“The only time his father ever gave him praise was when he had a perfect day at the plate”). Chase doesn’t see the car bearing down on him until it’s too late. When the tale resumes, a badly disfigured John Doe awakens in a hospital—and claims to be Ty Cobb, somehow alive again as a young man many decades after the baseball luminary’s death in 1961. As this restored Cobb recovers, he’s forced to deal with a very altered state of the world—and baseball. Colton eases his readers into this amusing premise with a good deal of narrative skill and patience. This leads to many dramatic payoffs, not the least of which is the opportunity it gives both the author and Cobb to comment on current-day baseball. At one point, Cobb muses: “It was clear that the game had changed from a contest of cunning and deception…to waiting for the circuit clout. It was now ‘boom or bust’ as nearly every batter, it seemed, was swinging from their heels, producing a proliferation of strikeouts and homeruns.” Baseball fans will likely love this kind of stuff (although some of them may disagree with the warm, appealing version of the famously unlikable Cobb presented here). And readers who aren’t aficionados of America’s national pastime will still appreciate the well-done time-travel mystery that unfolds throughout the book.
An intriguing, enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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