As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.
Two women do the best they can with their aging parents, a couple of British academics retired to France.
Though the title sounds like a murder mystery, in this case it refers to a feeling Miranda reports to her sister, Charlotte, by email, during a visit to their parents’ home: “You know what it’s like: the usual desire to kill.” That’s the sisters’ consistent reaction to spending time with their crotchety, ailing, brilliant parents (and their llamas, Lollo and Leonora). The portraits of Dad and Mum, delivered in the first person by actress/playwright Miranda, are the highlights of playwright Barnes’ fiction debut, along with the ongoing banter volleyed among all the characters. The book also includes emails between the sisters, letters written in the 1960s to someone named Kitty by “Your Loving Sister,” and a small number of sections written in the third person covering developments Miranda is not privy to. The book delights in arcane family rituals, code names, and practices: “doing the ducks”; characters referred to as DK (Dog Killer) and HQ (Headquarters); an apparently fictional sibling named James; the horrors of a finally retired chest freezer named Boswell, which was moved to France from England along with all its contents; a host of shared literary references, from Epictetus to Kipling, Shakespeare to Stevie Smith. Mum’s impending hip replacement surgery, to be performed in Paris, is the closest thing the book has to a plot—it occasions a gathering of all five family members, including Miranda’s 19-year-old daughter, Alice, at the parents’ home, where a few remaining mysteries are cleared up. Higher stakes would not have been a bad idea; as it is, the reader waits for something to knock these characters out of their patterns of humoring and needling and misunderstanding each other and it just doesn’t come, making for a melancholy denouement.
As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668062838
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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