Witty, frothy, and ultimately wise, this sendup of the marriage plot would make Mrs. Gaskell proud.
Sometimes a Victorian-era caper, replete with crinolines and coiffures, carries a shockingly important purpose beneath its skirts.
If Jane Austen and Nora Ephron collaborated, they might produce something close to this new novel by Waldman, in which two 19th century English servants conspire to see their mistress and master wed. Alice Lockey is lady’s maid to Lady Jemima Alderwick. While the imperious Lady Jemima tends to whine about hairstyles and finds two dozen gowns “so few” for a week in London, Alice believes her own position the best to which a farmer’s daughter might aspire. When Alice meets Charlie Wells, valet to Jemima’s suitor Viscount Nigel Wynstowe, she dreams they might marry and live under the same roof, if only Jemima will accept the rather doughty nobleman’s hand. Since Jemima prefers the attentions of a small-time con artist named Thomas Smythe-Roberts, Alice and Charlie scheme to endear the Viscount and the Lady. Things, of course, go awry, necessitating trips between town and country. During one of Alice’s errands in London (its urgency due to her wish to spend time with Charlie), the couple meets Emmeline, an administrator for the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, with its unfortunate acronym of SPEW. After attending a few of the Society’s lectures and meetings, Alice realizes that she and Charlie have markedly different ideas about their future together: “She and Charlie would grow old, content in the lives they had built in their homey rooms in their pleasant village. A good life. A happy life. But not the life she wanted.” Waldman comes up with an ending so interesting and unusual that to say even one word more would be unjust.
Witty, frothy, and ultimately wise, this sendup of the marriage plot would make Mrs. Gaskell proud.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781101875346
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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