A poignant, action-packed page-turner.
In Haynes’ historical novel, an embattled Abraham Lincoln wrestles with the decision to issue his still-to-be-finished Emancipation Proclamation.
It’s July of 1862, and Montgomery “Monty” Tolliver, one of the beleaguered president’s most trusted advisers, is sitting in Lincoln’s office. Today, Lincoln wants to hear Monty’s thoughts about how his Proclamation should be structured—should it apply only to the slave states, the border states, or to the whole country? And when should it be rolled out? Both men agree that the announcement should wait until they’ve achieved a Union victory. (“Changed circumstances require new thinking, different strategies,” Monty offers.) Meanwhile, across town, newspaper reporter Robert Geddis has just returned from covering the Union’s defeat in the battle for Richmond. The survivor of tragic family losses, Robert is now achieving success as a battlefield reporter for the Evening Star; his reports are said to be so detailed that Lincoln himself has requested that his articles be placed on his desk every day. In a Virginia medical tent, Robert’s friend from his time in Kansas, Billy Rutledge, is recovering from battlefield injuries. Billy, originally from Mississippi, has been living in Texas under the name Ezekiel Colton and serves as a major in the Fifth Texas Regiment of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. The novel’s fourth protagonist is Monty’s adopted 16-year-old son, Josh Tolliver. Although he’s underage, Josh has just enlisted in the Union Army. Haynes’ vibrant Civil War drama is depicted through the experiences of each of these four men as they reckon with the brutality of war and navigate behind-the-scenes political machinations. The narrative includes heavy doses of gritty battlefield action. Descriptions of Lincoln’s frustration with his generals, particularly the overly cautious George McClellan, offer plenty of intriguing, if occasionally belabored, historical tidbits, but the heart of the novel is the personal tribulations of the four protagonists. These characters are vivid and memorable—when Ezekiel grows disillusioned with the war and General Lee’s attack on Maryland, he becomes an unsung hero as Haynes adds a clever fictional twist to a longstanding Civil War mystery.
A poignant, action-packed page-turner.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781737766988
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2026
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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