A disjointed tale told with skill but also with ample use of dialect that may put off some readers.
Newsome tells the stories of a 19th-century slave boy and a family trying to get by in a contemporary North Carolina island community.
The Edwards children, Callie and Jeffy, are enjoying a vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when their parents take them to Hiatt Plantation so they can learn about slavery. After the family arrives at the plantation, the novel jumps back in time to that of Sammy, one of its young slaves. Newsome, the author of Joe Peas (2016), here tells Sammy’s story, making frequent use of dialect that may not be to everyone’s taste. Too frail for the fields, Sammy (called “Sambo” by his slave master) winds up working in the Hiatt house. But his brother Johnny is killed by a snakebite in the fields. To avoid that fate, Sammy runs away and takes his brother’s name to avoid suspicion. He is joined by a parrot that has also escaped the Hiatt house, and they end up at sea on a boat that raids other ships looking, in part, for treasure. This is where Newsome’s writing shines. He is especially adept at capturing seafaring dangers, including the risks that arise when a British warship closes in on Johnny’s ship and fires its cannon during a storm: “By now the ship was wallowing into troughs between the waves so deep that the crests of the waves could not be seen above the hull.” When Johnny and his bird are shipwrecked on a coastal island, the action shifts to the present and a family that has just moved to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Four-year-old J.J. befriends what seems to be Johnny’s spirit, who J.J.’s older siblings, Benji and Kelsey, think is an imaginary friend. J.J.’s dad, James, finds work at a nursing home and brings Benji to volunteer. They cross paths with an old grifter named Charles Murphy, and when Benji finds a bit of treasure, Murphy swoops in. Both the historical and present-day stories are entertaining, and their plots have some symmetry. Newsome doesn’t quite nail the transition when he brings Johnny’s story into the present, but by then readers may be too absorbed in the story to mind. Given the youth of its characters, this novel might appeal most to children or young teenagers who are ready for mature content, such as a reference to a “sexual liaison” and an auction featuring a naked slave.
A disjointed tale told with skill but also with ample use of dialect that may put off some readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2020
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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