An informative, engaging personal drama with three strong female leads.
In Stoller’s historical novel, the lives of three diverse young women dramatically intersect at a California shipyard in 1944.
Luisa Elena Gonzales Guzmán, called Elena, is from El Salvador. She has fled her country, where her father, the publisher of a progressive newspaper, has been arrested. Ruby Mae Taylor, a Black woman from Baton Rouge, leaves home with her family in search of better work opportunities. Rachel Stern is a Jewish nurse from the Bay Area, the daughter of a local physician. They converge at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California: Elena, formerly a reporter for her father’s paper, becomes a welder; Ruby Mae and her sister, Peggy, train as riveters; and Rachel works in the shipyard clinic. The dangers of shipyard work keep Rachel busy tending to a plethora of job-related injuries, many the result of insufficient training and lax attention to safety procedures. (Supplies are short, and the pressure is intense to produce more ships quickly). Rachel meets Ruby Mae when the riveter’s father is brought into the clinic with a badly broken leg; she meets Elena when the welder suffers a bad burn on her hand caused by a worn-out glove. The novel follows these three women and their budding friendships through the year as they face discrimination and trauma, especially after the infamous, deadly explosion at the nearby Port Chicago Naval base (“They think the casualties are in the hundreds”). The personal dramas work as a potent vehicle for illustrating the era’s racial segregation in the Navy (only Black sailors were assigned to load the deadly ammunition), antisemitism (amplified by the war), and misogyny. Alternating perspectives among the three central protagonists—a narrative technique that keeps the pages turning—Stoller skillfully fleshes out the characters as they courageously confront their own fears and insecurities. Through these young women, the author draws vivid portraits of Black, Latine, and Jewish cultures, which all face the same bigotry against ‘others.’ Precise details bring readers up close to the processes of riveting and welding, the specifics of wound treatment, and the suffocating environment of the shipyard.
An informative, engaging personal drama with three strong female leads.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2025
ISBN: 9798897409808
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
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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