An artfully composed latticework of stories that captures the moral chaos of war.
In Mayfield’s historical novel, as World War II comes to a close, nine people with intersecting lives come to grips with their fates.
On May 7, 1945, the end of the war is celebrated in Times Square in New York City; it’s a huge event covered by Farley Sackstead, a legendary broadcaster and the “wartime voice of CBS Radio in Europe.” This voice serves as connective tissue in the author’s tangled skein of a plot, which chronicles the troubled lives of nine characters in both America and Europe. Farley is unaware of a mentally ill young man, Riley Blaine, who is on his way to Farley’s broadcasting booth to assassinate him; both the plan and the gun have been provided by the widow Selma Filbert, the “Cat Woman,” a profoundly disturbed person who finds Farley’s voice “very upsetting.” Riley, exasperated at being called an “imbecile” all of his life, is on a second mission, as well—he can’t wait to see Jenny Doyle, a 15-year-old from Queens, picked to sing the national anthem at the grand affair. Riley meets her when he is deemed mentally unfit and dismissed from the military after briefly serving with her brother Jimmy, a B-17 gunner still stationed in Germany. The author cleverly tracks the threads connecting each character with such deftness that the text, which initially reads like a collection of stand-alone short stories, is finally embroidered into a coherent whole. In one of the subplots, a Polish Jew, Antoni Pietkowski, is given the opportunity to interrogate Franz Stangl, an SS officer who presided over his captivity at the concentration camp in Sobibor; the emotionally wrenching experience is powerfully portrayed by Mayfield. The work can feel overstuffed at times—there are many subplots crammed into this short novel, which is less than 200 pages in length. Selma and Riley are the least developed characters, both little more than literary types. However, the other plotlines, despite their relative brevity, are surprisingly substantive, animated by an impressive psychological subtlety.
An artfully composed latticework of stories that captures the moral chaos of war.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781646035977
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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