Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.
An artist blurs the line between reality and performance as she livestreams her stalker’s abuses on the eve of an important gallery show.
Sabine is a successful conceptual artist about to debut her newest work, “fifteen photographic portraits of her…covered from head to toe in sheer costumes. These wearable puppets, several feet long…featured silicone faces that Sabine could position over her own.” Titled things like “Crone,” “Baby,” “Stay at Home Mother,” and “Baba Yaga,” the portraits purport to explore the archetypes of female identity as experienced by the individual, and singular, female artist. Or, as Sabine explains it to a collector and the gallery owner, Cecily, “It’s about pretending to be something you already are.” The problem is the show could also be about falsity, or juxtaposition, or “the face and the body and the night,” or any number of other things depending on the viewer. This difficulty with definition, and Sabine’s oscillation between her sense of utter failure and artistic victory, tears at her as she flounders through the pre-opening publicity push wherein her main strategy is to livestream both the bizarre and banal of her everyday in an attempt to “coauthor a work with the public…to start a dialogue with the viewer…in real time.” Throughout it all, Sabine’s beleaguered husband, Constantine; her friend Ruth, whose whale-shaped cakes “occup[y] the intersection between baking and marine life”; and Cecily’s partner, Freya, whose sculptures sell for thousands, attempt to soothe and bolster her ego, with little success. As Sabine’s anxiety ramps up, she's visited by the apparition of feminist art icon Carolee Schneeman, offering protection against the insistent attentions of a stalker who peers in Sabine’s windows with the muddied face of a Rembrandt self-portrait. The whirligig pace of the novel relentlessly intensifies from chapter to chapter as Sabine navigates the boundary between real and manufactured, all in front of a live audience. If Sabine mistakes art for life, or vice versa, the results could be deadly—both for her body of work and her actual body. The book is a pointedly absurdist send-up of the pretensions of the art world, which nevertheless carries at its core a real exploration of what is at stake when one lives for art. Baxter continues her triumphant exploration of real lives lived on the fringes of the surreal.
Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781646222551
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
Simply charming.
A lovable gaggle of competitive quilters attempts to defy the odds.
The ladies of the Ogden Quilters Association are gearing up for another Simpton Family Quilting Extravaganza, and this year’s nationwide competition is extra special: It’s taking place just an hour away in Smithfield, Utah. For Betty Lou Dearden, OQA’s leader and most faithful member, who never misses a Wednesday quilting night and delights in reading the bylaws, this is a dream come true—a chance to put Utah quilting on the map. But beneath her bubbly surface, Betty Lou is struggling—longtime member Leera Smeeth has been passive aggressively shooting down Betty Lou’s ideas and attacking her sense of self for years (see: a particularly biting comment about her beloved peach bathroom); her children rarely visit; and her husband’s health is declining. And to top it off, OQA is down a member since Terry Blackfoot left following the oft-referenced but never explained “needle incident.” OQA’s remaining members—flighty but lovable Lucy Jones; dependable Diane Williams and her roommate, Alice Flagstaff; and innovative Candace Braithwaite—need more support. Enter Byron Grant, a gay sewing store manager who deals in rumor and gossip as much as in thread and batting, and his best friend, shy, artistic Rob, both younger than the youngest OQA member by about 30 years. Don’t worry, there’s nothing in the bylaws expressly prohibiting men. And so this quirky group of artisans attempts to dethrone the always-winning, clearly evil Logan Quilters Society (“We don’t hate anyone!...We just don’t prefer to associate with cheaters”), all the while wrestling with interpersonal conflict, trauma, and, let’s face it, a few tacky ideas. The plot is silly and largely predictable, but McCann’s prose is bursting at the seams with humor and genuinely tender, touching moments. You’ll root for these misfits from Page 1.
Simply charming.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9798890920461
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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