For readers who enjoy swoony romance with a dash of history.
A group of assorted characters who for one reason or another never made it into their assigned berths on the Titanic form surprising bonds in Schaffert’s lush latest.
A year after the sinking of the Titanic, despondent young Yorick, who has used an inheritance to purchase an antiquarian bookshop in Paris from which he sells remarkably few volumes, receives a mysterious invitation to a party with 10 other “survivors” of the disaster, including a famous actress, a mystery writer, and a toymaker, who assembled the group so they could share their stories. Yorick is particularly beguiled by Haze, a young man he sums up as “a yawn, and a stretch, and a flutter of long, ladylike eyelashes,” and intrigued by Zinnia, the Japanese American daughter of a candy magnate. Though, at Zinnia’s suggestion, the members of the group continue to assemble periodically to discuss controversial books, the plot primarily revolves around one romantic triangle: Yorick pines for Haze, who worships Zinnia, who longs for a romance with Yorick. A twist on Cyrano de Bergerac is added when Haze convinces Yorick to write love letters in his name to Zinnia. Schaffert has a much stronger gift for atmosphere than plot: He relies on the incursion of World War I, during which Haze serves as a freelance photographer, Yorick is commissioned to work as a censor, and Zinnia takes the reins of the candy company, to break the static triangle and then, postwar, wraps up the story hastily. The novel is at its best in evoking the sumptuous details of prewar life in Paris: a bookstore brought to new life by infusions of Zinnia’s cash and taste, a night at the opera where the spectators spend as much time looking at each other as listening to the music, the secret club that feels like being “inside the Chinese box where Dorian Gray kept his opium—the black and gold-dust lacquer, the patterns of curved waves, the silk, the crystal, the plaited metal threads.”
For readers who enjoy swoony romance with a dash of history.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549158
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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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