A horrifying but ultimately moving story anchored by a complex narrator.
An enslaved young woman’s experiences come wrenchingly alive in this vivid historical novel.
Pheby Delores Brown, the novel’s narrator, was born on a Virginia plantation to its owner, Jacob Bell, and Ruth, one of the women enslaved there. As a child, Pheby was sheltered from much of the harshness of slavery, even taught to play the piano and to read, although the latter is against the law. Pheby is almost 18—the age at which Jacob has promised to free her—when the book opens in 1850. But Jacob has married a younger wife, Delphina, who resents Ruth and Pheby bitterly. When Jacob takes Ruth on a trip, Delphina sells Pheby to a slave trader. Roped into a coffle with dozens of other enslaved people for the long walk to Richmond, she is thrust into a nightmare of brutal, dehumanizing treatment. In Richmond, at a notorious slave trading center called the Jail, light-skinned, pretty Pheby is marked for sale as a “fancy girl.” But Rubin Lapier, the White man who owns the Jail, claims her for himself even though she is pregnant with the son of Essex Henry, a stable hand at the Bell plantation, now a runaway. Although Richmond’s White elite get their wealth from slaveholding, traders like Lapier are considered disreputable enough that White women will not marry them. Pheby becomes his “yellow wife,” running his household and bearing him five children. Johnson’s first-person narration gives the reader a window into the terrible burden of doubleness that Pheby carries, always performing submission to keep herself and her children safe, painfully aware that behind Lapier’s usually courteous treatment of her is a ruthless sadism. As time passes, she realizes she must find a way to send her Black son, Monroe, to freedom before Lapier sells him (or worse) in some fit of anger, and her life becomes much more dangerous. Johnson is unsparing in her depiction of the physical, psychological, and spiritual damages wrought by slavery and realistic in her portrayal of the heroism of Pheby and others in resisting it—they cannot change the world, but they do what they can, and sometimes that’s extraordinary.
A horrifying but ultimately moving story anchored by a complex narrator.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982149-10-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Searles’ affection for the period and his characters infuses the novel with the bright energy of a twirly vintage sundress.
A fictionalized account of Helen Gurley Brown’s life and career.
Searles, who worked at Cosmopolitan for 23 years and became friends with its founding editor at the end of her career, opens his novel with a chilling scene in which he has 10-year-old Helen and her sister, Mary Eloine, witness their father’s grisly death in an elevator accident. (In an author’s note, he explains that though Helen wasn’t actually present when this occurred, she felt she “may as well have been,” as it haunted her entire life.) Interleaving exuberantly imagined episodes from Brown’s childhood and coming-of-age in Los Angeles with scenes from her rise to power in the magazine world of New York, Searles has great fun with cliffhanger moments and the literary version of match cuts, where dialogue from one scene bleeds into the next. Helen was working as a copywriter for Max Factor when she met and married film producer David Brown, who was instrumental in encouraging her to write and publish Sex and the Single Girl, a 1962 advice book that sold two million copies in three weeks, a fact he relays to the chauvinist Hearst executive Helen petitions to let her start a magazine. Once installed as the new editor of a long-lived but floundering title, Cosmopolitan, she surrounded herself with a group of creative women and reinvented the publication, pioneering what might be thought of as the earliest version of click-bait with cover stories like “How To Unleash Your Secret Inner Sex Kitten,” “When Husbands Fail as Lovers: A Young Wife’s Frank Report,” and “Anatomy of the Other Woman.” Other real characters in the story include Liz Smith, who was an editor at Cosmo before she started her syndicated gossip column in the mid-1970s, and the photographer Francesco Scavullo, who did the covers of the magazine for decades.
Searles’ affection for the period and his characters infuses the novel with the bright energy of a twirly vintage sundress.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063485631
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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