A potent, vigorous coming-of-age tale featuring themes of identity, sexual liberation, and introspection.
A Canadian man wrestles with his family heritage and his adult life as a gay man in this debut novel.
Ned Baldwin, the lead character in Scott’s dynamic story, has graduated from Trinity, the Canadian college where he’s spent the last half-decade unraveling the mysteries of English literature, his future, and varying aspects of himself. With his college years behind him, Ned swiftly moves to London to get out from under his family’s thumb. It’s the mid-1980s, and he knows there’s work to do on himself, particularly accepting his sexuality in positive terms since he has self-loathingly admitted: “I wake up and it’s the first thing I think of, the last thing before I go to bed, that I’m this…faggot. That I’ll always be this faggot.” At a post-graduation “last supper,” he comes out to his best friend, Daniel. The scene is stiff and subdued, but nothing compares to Ned’s ordeal of revealing his sexuality to his upper-crust parents right after a car accident. Though London is enticing to Ned, it also harbors the potential to be lonely. Luckily, his bohemian aunt Cordelia is nearby, as is a wide rainbow of gay nightclubs and drag shows Ned ventures into. As he spreads his wings in the urban playground, he starts to fully acknowledge his gay feelings and separate himself from his privileged youth growing up in the stiflingly conservative and religiously pious confines of a wealthy family. He instantly embraces the city’s eccentric artist culture, an environment affording him numerous opportunities for diverse friendships and, as with the seductive Italian Luca, a first chance at sex and love. But Ned’s new life isn’t without darkness; a suicide attempt and the specter of AIDS hang over his yearlong exploration of London.
Scott is a clever writer, luxuriating in the meticulous details of his characters and elaborating on the wisps of gossip overheard at dinner parties. While maintaining the book’s brisk pacing and solid focus on its compelling protagonist, the author allows Ned to share the narrative stage with other characters who will draw readers in with their great impact on the hero’s life and future. Ned’s mother, Helena, is portrayed as a confidante who loves her son but remains at odds with his life choices, and his father, Oliver, just wants better things for him, the kind not found in the gay community in London. Ned is also haunted by the voice of an internal saboteur who “sometimes adopted his mother’s arguments, but gave them its own nasty twist.” Fond references to the works of Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, and others lend the narrative an acute sense of literary sophistication. Ultimately, Scott’s novel paints a vivid portrait of a man riding the first big wave of self-awareness based not on the legends of those tortured souls of the past but on the thrilling potential of what lies ahead. Readers of any sexual orientation will find Ned’s voyage of discovery a vibrant reminder of life’s multicolored bounty.
A potent, vigorous coming-of-age tale featuring themes of identity, sexual liberation, and introspection.Pub Date: July 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77751-399-3
Page Count: 259
Publisher: AOS Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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