An enthralling war story that doesn’t miss a step on its march to Berlin.
Sanders’ historical novel follows a band of female Soviet snipers on the Eastern Front during World War II.
The story starts with Jewish Soviet student turned soldier Elena Bruskina, who’s wounded at one of the final German defenses outside Berlin in 1945 before being reassigned to a role as an interpreter due to her university study of German. Readers then delve into Elena’s backstory, starting with her time in the tense, terrifying Minsk ghetto in 1941, where Nazis terrorize the remaining Jewish people in the occupied city. Elena joins a band of partisans, then enlists with one of the new all-female sniper units in the Red Army. Chapters alternate between those recounting Elena’s training and bonding with the other women in her unit, many of them also Jewish, and her work as an interpreter in occupied Berlin, attached to a unit working to ascertain Adolf Hitler’s whereabouts or confirm his death. Sanders has a talent for sensory detail, as when noting what the snipers use to protect their feet (“the bottom of her left foot ached from blisters because of a wrinkle in her foot wrapping”) and the conifer tea they drink to prevent scurvy. Sanders writes with an appealing economy: Some emotionally intense scenes, as when Elena and her unit occupy an intact German house and try on dresses for the first time in years, are short, which allows them to hit hard without slowing the narrative. It’s an unflinching story as well; characters witness and experience the sexual violence and exploitation that infested both armies. A long and detailed but conversational author’s note closes the book, presenting Sanders’ research and noting which parts of the novel are based on actual events. Overall, this book will appeal to aficionados of historical fiction with its compelling action-filled set pieces, unblinking depictions of ferocity and savagery on the front lines, and exquisitely rendered portrayals of lives under extraordinary strain.
An enthralling war story that doesn’t miss a step on its march to Berlin.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063319219
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
