A historically evocative period piece with a strong, inspiring hero who will resonate with a wide swath of readers.
A young woman sets out to find her infant daughter in 17th-century Boston.
From the outset, Lewis’ novel immerses readers in a pathologically moralistic Puritan society. After being brutally raped, the female protagonist, Rachel, attracts opprobrium and censure from the locals. She is forced—like Hester Prynne with her A—to wear a Won her breast, for Whore. Meanwhile the smirking lout who raped her, Henry Watkins, is simply sent back to his family in Salem, a clue as to how women were treated in this misogynistic time and place. But Rachel does have powerful help in the person of Anne Hutchinson, who takes her in. The Hutchinsons are fabulously wealthy, and Anne is the archenemy of power-obsessed Governor John Winthrop, who gets wind of the Bible sessions she leads in order to further her radical interpretation of Holy Writ. Rachel, though living with the Hutchinsons, is also a servant in the Winthrop household, and her master encourages her to report on her benefactress’ teachings. For devious reasons, Winthrop gins up a war against the Pequot tribe to the west, where Rachel has reason to believe she can find her daughter, who was taken away by her drunken father. So, she disguises herself as a teenage boy and volunteers. The Pequot War (1636–38) is a disgraceful and bloody expedition, but the Puritans win. Does Rachel find her infant daughter? Well, that’s spoiler territory, but let’s just say that the book’s ending is bittersweet.
Lewis has a raft of publications, fiction and nonfiction, under his belt, and the writing more than shows that. And Rachel, who is also the narrator, is a wonderful creation, smart and spunky and intuitive. As she sizes up of one of her inquisitors, “He tries to soften his voice to tell he is on my side, but the effect is hideous, as though he was a filthy toad trying to talk like a man.” She sees through the hypocrisy and venality of the powers that be (the Pequot War was widely considered a land grab). Anne Hutchinson was a real historical character, hated and feared by the establishment because she believed in the Covenant of Grace, as opposed to Winthrop and his crew, who backed the Covenant of Works. Winthrop managed to get Hutchinson, his nemesis, expelled from the colony. She resettled in Roger Williams’ Providence Plantations, a place of sanctuary in the New England sea of madness. Lewis, a retired academic who has a doctorate in the literature of that period, truly makes 17th-century New England come alive. He includes an anecdote about a woman who tries to kill her infant, and although this act will strike readers as horrendous and unconscionable, at least this poor woman’s tormented anxiety about her fate in the afterlife has been settled: She knows for certain that she’s damned. Rachel is part of this world, but she seems a harbinger of a newer, more humane society, and that is the saving—not the predestined—grace.
A historically evocative period piece with a strong, inspiring hero who will resonate with a wide swath of readers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781685624804
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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