A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.
A young Canadian woman in the 1920s learns about herself as she gets her first job in Williams’ historical novel.
In 1927 Vancouver, 17-year-old Clara Wilson, who’s still mourning the death of her mother five years prior, finds out quite suddenly that she, her father, and her slightly older sister, Louisa, are about to be evicted. She decides to go apply for a job at the Hotel Hamilton, a luxury hotel set to open the next month, and Louisa tags along against Clara’s wishes. As Clara fills out an application, she meets a spoiled young woman named Jane Morgan. All three young women make it through the application process to train to be maids. It turns out that snobbish Jane turned down the suitor that her parents picked for her, so she’s working in order to avoid being shipped off to England to live with an elderly relative. Clara sympathizes, but Jane’s privilege and laziness get on her nerves and nearly sabotage a test they must pass together. Clara’s afraid to complain to those in charge, as Jane’s uncle knows the hotel’s owner. However, when Jane shifts blame for her own mistakes onto Clara, the latter panics and acts in ways that may cost her the job she so desperately wants. The sisters also must deal with their father’s heavy drinking and unemployment and have only a month to cover their outstanding rent. Williams’ depiction of the complexity of the often tense relationship between the sisters is the highlight of the novel as a whole. Clara’s interactions with Louisa, an aspiring actress, are frequently fraught, as Clara feels obligated to watch out for her sibling but is jealous of her beauty and her seeming ease with navigating the world around her. They frequently antagonize each other but also help each other out. There are some nice period details throughout the novel, too, including bits of 1920s slang and headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis. The story can be slow in spots, bogged down by unnecessary detail, but it has a satisfying ending.
A pleasant coming-of-age tale with well-developed main characters.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989144-16-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Rippling Effects
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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