An involving, well-written debut.
Reardon’s novel vividly depicts coping with mental illness.
Amelia Glickman can’t function without weed and alcohol and random hookups. And she can’t blame an abusive or even a chilly childhood. Her upper middle class parents’ divorce was traumatic, but they both love her fiercely and support her regardless. And they are even finding new and admirable partners. After Amelia, a longtime equestrian, puts her horse, Hope, at risk by jumping her while stoned, she breaks down and agrees to a “grippy-sock vacay,” a stint in rehab. Thus begins the lead’s long, hard trek to recovery, which will be the arc of the book. This means a series of dreary church basement meetings of fellow sufferers. But some of the sufferers become her fast friends and the little house with the red door on Wethersfield Road in Austin becomes an almost magical shelter and retreat. Of course, the journey has plenty of setbacks, stoking dramatic tension, often because of real jerks, guys who exploit her desperate need for love, or what passes for it. But through it all, at least she guards her sobriety and she lucks onto good people, like the wise Ethan who becomes her housemate (the key is to find people who have gone through the fire). She has a deep connection to her horse and to her dog, Delilah—no surprise that animals are more trustworthy and giving than so many humans. And she also has an eating disorder—bingeing and purging—which she managed to keep secret…until she can’t. One theme here is Amelia’s learning to accept her body.
A former mental health therapist, Reardon infuses the book with a passion for recovery and appreciation of life. Her background brings bona fides to an expansive, engrossing novel that might have been based on well-meaning guesswork and assumptions. Amelia’s recovery is slow and often painful, especially after tangling with Jerk #1 and then Jerk #2. Were it not for Ethan, she would be justified in swearing off men entirely. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen. (She does discover, however, thanks to an encounter with Cat, her old high school rival, that she’s bisexual.) Reardon, a skilled writer, has made Amelia a witty guide through the drama and pain. From feeling when we first meet her like “a scream looking for a mouth,” Amelia fights through all her formidable demons, many of which had been incubated very early on—no surprise as these things go—to being so confident that she can go to grad school and become a mental health therapist herself. A recurring scene, and theme, is the annual New Year’s Eve party on Wethersfield Road to celebrate the good lives earned, a riotous affair even though all the revelers are cold sober. Amelia is a frustrating character until she eventually becomes a celebrant of the good life, inviting us to share it, at which point she becomes all but irresistible. Toward the very end of the novel, there is a coy surprise waiting for the reader, one that explains much.
An involving, well-written debut.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798992419870
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Trampoline Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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