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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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