An expressive and striking story that examines what one does for family and for oneself.
A novel about an ambitious young woman who navigates familial trauma while working as a copy boy in late-1930s San Francisco.
At the height of the Great Depression, 17-year-old Jane Hopper arrives home one night to find her pregnant mother packing their possessions into the car of federal labor camp manager Uno Jeffers. Her mother wants them to move, and when Jane’s father, Abraham, arrives home inebriated and angry, a domestic brawl ensues. Jane feels an obligation to her mother, who blames her for the death of Jane’s stillborn fraternal twin, Benjamin, so she fights her father. During the melee, she hears her brother’s voice in her head urging her on, and she leaves Abraham for dead. Her mother has left without her, so Jane flees to San Francisco for a fresh start. Three months later, she’s working for a newspaper called the Prospect and posing as a boy with her brother’s name, Benny Hopper. While working as a copy boy, Jane meets a woman named Vee who says, “I’ve got a story for you, rookie.” They make an appointment to meet, which Jane doesn’t keep; then Vee is attacked and hospitalized. Jane finds a picture of Vee and decides to look into the woman’s life, which leads her to uncover a story of corruption that ties Jane’s own new life to her former one. In her debut, Blanton-Stroud, who teaches writing at Sacramento State University, effectively evokes the dichotomy of Jane’s rural and urban lifestyles, particularly when highlighting Jane’s family’s poverty. The author’s descriptive language is robust, especially when setting scenes: “Benjamin Franklin Hopper was born into a shattered bulb, shards buried under the loose, gray silt of a ravaged Texas plain.” There are occasional minor errors, and the device of Jane repeatedly hearing Benjamin’s voice in her head doesn’t add very much to the narrative aside from a very strong opening. Even so, Blanton-Stroud’s book remains an engrossing work of fiction.
An expressive and striking story that examines what one does for family and for oneself.Pub Date: June 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-697-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 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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