An engaging, thoughtful introduction to an overlooked scientific pioneer.
An abandoned wife becomes an acclaimed astronomer in Vizurraga’s fictionalized autobiography of a real-life woman who charted the stars while navigating the constraints of her era.
In 1879, pregnant Scottish immigrant Williamina “Mina” Fleming is abandoned by her husband. Though she had hoped to continue her education in America, she counts herself lucky to find a job as a maid in the household of Harvard astrophysicist Edward Pickering. Once Pickering discovers Mina’s keen intellect, he employs her as a “computer” (“We have a few women computers, unusually adept at mathematics. But not in the Observatory proper. The machinery is heavy and requires some strength to manage, as you can see”). Analyzing photographic images captured by the observatory’s telescope, Mina identifies, classifies, and tracks the movements of stars. She is soon promoted and acquires many additional responsibilities. This begins a 30-year career at the observatory in which she plays various roles: supervisor, editor, and co-developer of what will become the field-wide system for classifying stars. Mina’s story is a compelling portrait of a talented woman coming into her own. Initially regarding her position merely as fortunate employment, she gradually recognizes herself as a true astronomer and trailblazer. The author skillfully illuminates the paradox of women’s scientific work in this era: Because examining photographic plates was dismissed as tedious drudgery, women were permitted—and egregiously underpaid—to perform it, yet this very marginalization granted them the intellectual liberty to excel. Mina emerges in these pages as a woman whose achievements are remarkable by the standards of her time, yet she remains systematically constrained, burdened with expectations placed on no male colleagues, and denied deserved recognition. She chafes at her inadequate compensation and the exhausting dual demands of a scientific career and household management, but her gratitude for opportunities she never anticipated and her amazement at her own accomplishments temper her protests—perhaps more than they should. Throughout, she maintains admirable humor and perspective. Vizurraga’s decision to render the text in verse lends the narrative a certain distinctiveness, but the approach adds little substantively and occasionally sacrifices sensory detail and immediacy.
An engaging, thoughtful introduction to an overlooked scientific pioneer.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780988393127
Page Count: 388
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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