An engrossing and thought-provoking novel.
As Japan teeters on the abyss of doom, a strange American bomb falls into its hands.
In 1945, B-29s turn Japanese cities into fiery hellscapes, but Japan fights on in a hopeless cause. A U.S. bomber nicknamed Wicked Intent crashes and kills its crew. Japanese civilians who discover the wreckage don’t know what to make of the puzzling object that had been inside and is buried in the dirt nearby, looking “like a big black daikon radish.” They conclude it’s the biggest bomb anyone has ever seen. Inside the device are rings of metal no one recognizes, but a simple chemistry lab test shows it to be uranium. Army Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara understands the significance. He knows about Japan’s own unsuccessful efforts to enrich uranium. To figure out how to make the stray bomb workable to unleash horror on enemy forces or even on America itself, he recruits the U.S.-educated physicist Keizo Kan, who has been working in his garden. The scientist despises war, and he desperately wants to find his beloved American-born wife, Noriko, who has been arrested and detained for unknown reasons. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area, they share a deep fondness for U.S. movies: “Taylor loves Garbo,” he tells her before the war. “Garbo loves Taylor,” she responds with a kiss. From a distance Sagara witnesses the fireball over Hiroshima, and he knows what it is. He will do everything in his power to have the discovered bomb loaded onto a plane to smite America. Nagasaki soon follows, as history confirms. But the fictional third atomic bomb might still deliver a devastating blow. Meanwhile, there is talk of a coup to overthrow the “defeatists” who want to surrender. The plot feels entirely plausible, and none of the characters fit any obvious stereotypes. Sagara, the antagonist, is addicted to Philopon, a methamphetamine that drives his relentless work. (This was a real product considered so dangerous that Japan banned it after the war.) Were it up to him, every Japanese citizen would “eat stones”—fight to the death. The author’s research is impressive as he describes how the bomb is designed to work, the tensions within the Japanese power structure, and details of Japanese culture.
An engrossing and thought-provoking novel.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083055
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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