A well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinian politics.
An Argentinian journalist pursues what may be the story of a lifetime in Sanderson’s novel.
On a chilly night in Buenos Aires in 1956, a man hands an infant girl over to a young nun at an orphanage. Fifty-two years later, in 2006, journalist Andrés Carriego, an outspoken critic of the corrupt Peronist movement, makes a living writing under the pen name Funes—a reference to a story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who makes a cameo later on. Carriego is in possession of 30 years’ worth of writings by a mysterious woman who claims to be the daughter of politician Juan Perón and a 13-year-old girl named Nélida Haydeé Rivas. Days after Perón's reburial in San Vincente sparked bloody protests, Carriego received a journal from a woman who was killed in the violence. In a note, she identifies herself as Dolores Perón Rivas and asks Carriego to share her story. Through Dolores’ journal, Sanderson describes, in intricate detail, the orderly but loveless convent from which she escaped at 15, the cigarette smoke and raised voices of her bohemian apartment, and the wretchedness of a jail cell. Dolores is also shown to be a victim of assault and other atrocities committed during a 1976 military dictatorship. Sanderson, a Fulbright scholar who’s published extensive work on Latin America, challenges readers to solve the story’s mysteries, perhaps knowing that historical questions become boring the moment they’re answered. Along the way, he manages to spin an almost mystical tale, full of visions, sacrifice, and wandering, out of Perón and Rivas’ story. Alongside the political tumult and bloodshed, he effectively explores themes involving motherhood and sexist attitudes toward women. Nuns repeatedly tell Delores that her mother was a “whore,” for example, but she still wants desperately to meet her; this longing manifests in fixations on maternal figures, which bleed into attraction in the case of Sister Fabula, the only kind nun at the convent, and Blanca, a university student. It all leads to a devastating, inevitable confrontation between Dolores and Rivas in the book’s second half.
A well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinian politics.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-914913-01-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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