A captivating gold-rush tale told from the viewpoint of an indomitable woman.
A New England woman builds a life in the rugged frontier of California in this gold-rush novel with elements of feminism and romance.
Elisabeth Goodwin’s comfortable life in her family’s home with an orchard in Concord, Massachusetts, comes to a cruel and abrupt end in 1847. Blight destroys the apple crop, and the family is forced to work in a textile mill. Desperate, her father, Henry, mortgages the farm and abandons the family to poverty, moving west as a trapper with the Hudson Company. Three years later, as news of the discovery of gold spreads around the world, Elisabeth follows with her new husband, Nathaniel Parker, resolved to find her father and his claim on the American River in Central California. When her father runs off, leaving her his gold claim, the promise of riches soon gives way to the reality of grueling work and disappointment. Married in haste and desperation, Elisabeth soon finds that her new husband is more interested in the burly gold miners than his wife. But inspired by the copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” that is her only tie to her childhood home, Elisabeth emerges from each daunting setback more determined to survive. Though her letters home to her childhood friend Louisa May Alcott are filled with lies about her successful life with an ideal family, Elisabeth fights to achieve independence and find passion and intimacy. As her struggles intensify, she comes to realize that, despite Emerson’s eloquent text, self-reliance is a different prospect altogether for a woman alone.
Voorsanger creates a memorable hero in Elisabeth as well as a vivid depiction of the rough-and-tumble frontier life of mid-19th-century California, which is characterized by equal parts boundless optimism and humiliating despair. The author’s language is evocative and beautifully apt both to period and subject, as when Elisabeth questions some miners about their claims: “The men split open up like a sack of beans then, spilling out tales of digging and finding just enough flecks to keep them fed.” Although Elisabeth’s reaction to her husband’s sexuality is harshly homophobic, Voorsanger displays sensitivity and compassion in Nate’s description of the shame and glory of his gay identity. The depiction of an all-male Fandango gathering, where rough miners dance, drink, and find comfort with one another, is a provocative piece of history, as is the portrayal of the plight of the Californios, the ancestral owners of the land whose proud status is delegitimized by the arrival of a flood of White prospectors. Elisabeth’s often thwarted desire for sexual intimacy is poignant, though many of the bodice-ripping sex scenes lack the subtlety that characterizes the other facets of the narrative. But overall, this work is a lucid portrait of the evolution of a strong woman in an “ambitious and urgent” period in California history.
A captivating gold-rush tale told from the viewpoint of an indomitable woman. (acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-781-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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