An often engaging account of a dispiriting real-life story with plenty of historical heft and contemporary relevance.
Kinsolving presents a historical novel based on what newspapers of the 1920s termed the “Rhinelander Affair”: a love story that turned into a salacious scandal and courtroom battle.
Twenty-something Alice Jones meets 18-year-old Leonard Kip Rhinelander in 1921. She’s one of three daughters of a couple who emigrated from England. Her father, George Jones, was the son of a West Indian sailor and a white English tavern owner; her white mother, Elizabeth, was a kitchen maid in a grand British estate. In 1891, the couple moved to New York. Now, 30 years later, Alice is walking down Pelham Road in New Rochelle when Leonard drives by in his new Oldsmobile convertible. Momentarily distracted by her, Leonard can’t stop his car quickly enough and bumps into a police car parked by the curb. Impulsively, Alice tells Sgt. Kelly that she saw what happened, and that the tall, gangly driver wasn’t speeding. Leonard, the young scion of New York’s top-tier Rhinelander family, gratefully offers her a ride. By the time he drops her home, four hours later, they’re smitten with each other. Within a few months, Leonard’s father, Philip, learns of their relationship, and he aims to torpedo their romance, sending Leonard to places far and wide for the next two years—but he can’t prevent them from writing voluminous letters to each other. An uncomfortably generous portion of the novel is devoted to the steamy contents of Alice’s letters to her beau: “you always knew that I love to be in your loving arms and hold your warm lips to mine. I knew many times, Len, dear, how I have made you feel very happy.” The letters are made public in a 1925 trial in which Philip forces his son to sue Alice for annulment of their secret 1924 marriage. The trial plays out in disturbingly lurid detail, vividly illustrating the implicit and explicit misogyny and racism of the period. Alice’s older sister, Emily Jones Brooks, serves as a knowledgeable narrator for Kinsolving’s fictionalized version of the real-life drama.
An often engaging account of a dispiriting real-life story with plenty of historical heft and contemporary relevance.Pub Date: May 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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