A funny, respectful sendup of the unpredictable responses to a widespread plague.
In this farcical novel, a 14th-century blacksmith searches for part of a holy relic that could stop the devastating Black Death.
A plague dubbed the Great Mortality sweeps through France in 1350. People in blacksmith Jake’s village take preventative measures, from isolating to waving hands in front of their faces (“to keep the bad air away”). Sadly, the plague strikes and kills many villagers. A local priest, certain that Jake, as a Mortality survivor, is “in God’s favor,” sends him on a quest. He’s to recover half of St. Ambrose’s toenail that someone stole two years ago. Surely making the toenail whole again will put an end to the plague. Jake heads to Montpellier to track down the priest who supposedly bought the relic from the thief. Along the way, he finds traveling companions: Cassandra, the pope’s No. 3, and Isaac, a Jewish chief financier. The trio meets a motley batch of folks touting shocking ways to fight the Mortality, including performing daily flagellations and murdering Jews, whom many blame for the plague. But as Jake and his friends soon learn, apparently nothing works. Lazris unmistakably lambastes reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic, which he openly discusses in his preface. His biggest targets, it seems, are those advocating anti-Asian hostility; in this book, people are convinced, without evidence, that Jews are poisoning wells. But even the most spiteful characters come across as absurd or silly in this surprisingly lighthearted, engaging comedy. At the same time, endless plague-centric conversations spark copious dialogue scenes without much action. Still, these provide much of the humor—for example, amusingly misplaced contemporary dialect and profanity. The author calls this a “3-D book”—12 songs he wrote accompany the chapters. He includes lyrics, and readers can listen to the folksy songs (performed by other artists) on his website or a streaming service.
A funny, respectful sendup of the unpredictable responses to a widespread plague.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66781-413-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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