Gritty yet generous slice of early-20th-century American life.
Smith’s second novel, originally published in 1948, returns to the author’s home territory, the tenements of pre-gentrified Brooklyn, with another young female protagonist trying to improve her life.
Margy Shannon’s ambitions are more modest than those found in Smith’s earlier, openly autobiographical classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. At 17, Margy has limited expectations beyond the life she’s known. Having left high school, she is relatively happy with her job as letter reader at a mail-order business. She's made friends there and has a crush on her boss, kindly Mr. Prentiss, whose genteel mother’s manipulative domination stops him from acting on his attraction to Margy—in today’s workplace, to act would be considered harassment, but the novel makes Mr. Prentiss’ mother the villain. Margy lives at home with her own dominant mother, Flo, who is too emotionally stunted to show her love for Margy. Flo’s marriage with Margy’s “shoved around” father is fueled by mutual unhappiness; yet Margy dreams of marriage and children. She is thrilled when halfheartedly asked on a date by Frankie, a messenger for a Wall Street brokerage company. The product of yet another domineering mother, Frankie wants to escape his rough family and is looking for a “sensible,” unflashy girl. He pushes Margy to marry but proves uninterested in physical intimacy, at least with her, and has no desire for children. Margy’s Protestant friend Reenie follows a livelier, if riskier, path, carrying on an open affair with her Catholic boyfriend. When she gets pregnant, he marries her despite parental concerns. Meanwhile, pregnancy leads to a crisis in Margy’s marriage, and her future takes an unexpected turn. Reading Smith today means acknowledging the shadow of homophobia hanging over Frankie and the demonization of "dominant" mothers while appreciating the multidimensional, nuanced portrayals of the working-class characters and a version of feminism that applauds both work and motherhood as valid choices.
Gritty yet generous slice of early-20th-century American life.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06298-868-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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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