An engaging, if familiar, Western tale that should make fans of the genre happy.
A Southerner joins the Union Army and ends up forging a new life in the West in this sprawling novel from a husband-and-wife team.
As the story opens, Thomas Jefferson Summers is facing the end of his life at the age of 60. The totality of that life unfolds as the book flashes back to 1862, when Tom, 16, and his brother, John Adams Summers, 19, set off to fight for the Union Army during the Civil War. Tom is soon injured and deserts his post to head back home (“He had seen all of the war that he wanted to see”). Tragically, he finds that his parents have died and his Tennessee town has burned to the ground. And that’s just in the first 30 pages, with the rest of the narrative following Tom as he heads west, settles down, starts a family, and forges a new life in an untamed territory. Tom’s trek takes him up the Mississippi and then, via horseback, to Oklahoma, where he eventually ends up near a settlement called Camp Supply, builds a thriving cattle farm, and meets the love of his life after seeing her photograph in a newspaper. Together, they raise their children on the frontier, battling bandits, the weather, and more. This epic tale of perseverance, love, and loss includes attempted rape, murder, and other unsavory crimes in some of the wildest days of the Wild West. Called a “True-to-Life” tale, the Riddles’ novel certainly feels authentic, moves at a fast clip, and introduces readers to some rich characters, namely Tom and his family members, whom readers will care about. But the story is not without its problems. It sometimes indulges in clichés, from backwoods Southern bumpkins in Arkansas to a tobacco-spitting chuckwagon cook and a ruthless, poker-playing bandit—there’s even a scene featuring snakes, a horse, and a river, which evokes Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, one of the greatest Westerns of all time. On the plus side, there are vivid descriptions of harsh weather and brutal people. But for the most part, the audience has seen or read all of this before. Even what should be the tale’s biggest twist involving Tom is inevitable. Still, the story will satisfy lovers of Westerns even if the narrative is often predictable.
An engaging, if familiar, Western tale that should make fans of the genre happy.Pub Date: July 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1642147193
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2023
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
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
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