Succeeds not only in its intricately balanced plot, but also in its emotional weight.
A generations-spanning saga of collectible eggs and the people in their orbit.
In the 1920s, on the cliffs of North Yorkshire, various gangs control the business of collecting seabird eggs, which can be quite lucrative. But at Metland Farm, it’s common knowledge that the edge of the cliff is too dangerous to scale. When Celie Sheppard, fatherless misfit, and Robert, the farmhand, find a way for her to descend through a crack in the rock, she finds a guillemot nest with one perfectly red egg, and for the next 30 years, she fetches one red egg a year for a special collector, George Ambler, who pays handsomely for the rarity. In the present time, in Wales, two men break into the house of a young man, Weird Nick, and his mother, tie them up, and steal an “old egg in a fancy wooden box” that Nick bought from eBay. Nick and his friend Patrick decide to do some sleuthing and see if they can get the egg back, because it’s clearly valuable. Their adventures bring them into direct contact with an egg expert, Dr. Christopher Connor; a militant member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; and an accused egg-stealer who has sacrificed all material comforts for his collection. Bauer interweaves Celie and Ambler’s story with Nick and Patrick’s adventures, and it’s a slow burn in the sense that it takes a while to understand both the scope of the novel and the significance of the “Metland Egg” because there’s a lot of switching back and forth between time periods and characters. But once it all begins to hit, the uniqueness of the world and the charm of the characters is undeniable. There’s a wistfulness, too, to the fact that in order to preserve something beautiful like this egg, the chick inside must die. As one character says, “Jeez…who knew the world of eggs was so cut-throat!”
Succeeds not only in its intricately balanced plot, but also in its emotional weight.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164414
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
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
BOOK REVIEW
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