A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.
A writer born and raised in Honolulu offers an insider’s perspective on Hawaii in a debut historical novel about a family that moves there before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the depths of the Depression, the Doyles—Sadira, aka Sadie, and Archie, and their sons, Lionel and Kenny—chafe against the limits of their small town in upstate New York. Tongues wag in Carlisle, mostly about Archie’s drinking. After one too many binges, he’s fired from his job but recommended for one in Hawaii. With high hopes the Doyles set sail in 1936 and find much good in paradise. Sadie snags a job as the society writer for the Honolulu Chronicle, and she is kept busy given that Honolulu is a favorite stop for celebrities and wannabes. But Archie can’t put the cork back in the bottle and squanders more than one opportunity. Kenny, a normal kid, is happy enough, but older brother Lionel is a sensitive (and perceptive) young man subject to wild mood swings. From alternating perspectives, Matthews shows daily life in Hawaii and the trauma of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. An experienced writer and writing teacher, she ably tells her story through a dual point of view with some sections narrated by Sadie and some by Lionel. Lionel’s perspective is impressive, but in many ways he’s a typical high-drama teenager. Sadie enjoys the glamour of her job even while complaining about it. The Doyles’ story has some wonderfully realized characters, like Renee Manchester, who at first seems a classic floozie but who, readers learn, has much more to her. And the Doyles’ landlady, Mrs. Fong, is a paragon of tough love and wise counsel. But it’s Sadie who holds the family together and who at book’s end is battered but unbowed. Spanning the years from the influenza pandemic of 1918 until the aftermath of World War II in 1946, this story is a saga that earns its magnetism.
A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57869-091-6
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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