An intriguing premise turns disappointingly banal.
A Venezuelan family living illegally in Trinidad is forced to work for a crime lord in this comic novel.
Twenty-four-year-old Yola Palacio and her extended family are having a backyard barbecue when a man holding a gun strides into the gathering, introduces himself as Ugly, and announces that Yola’s recently deceased Aunt Celia owed him a large sum of money, which the entire Palacios family must pay off by working for him—on pain of death or deportation back to the dysfunctional Venezuela they fled two years earlier. The four Palacios households begin receiving waves of illegal immigrants, whom they must house, feed, and entertain for free. Shuttling these refugees is Ugly’s handsome enforcer, Román, toward whom Yola feels an immediate and bewildering carnal pull. Soon the Palacios settle into a sort of rhythm: Every few months, they host “a mix of fleeing intellectuals, political refugees, impoverished asylum seekers, and a smattering of adventurers just looking for a new start,” befriending their kinder guests and tolerating the obnoxious ones. Everyone, that is, except Yola's Aunt Milagros, who becomes suspicious of the refugees and eventually shoots a child living in her home. Román tells Yola—they’ve become lovers who bond over their “shared love of books”—that he’s sent Milagros back to Venezuela and told Ugly that she’s dead, and the remaining Palacios are forced to work in Ugly’s clandestine high-end strip club in various capacities. Debut author Mackenzie maintains a jangly, casual sort of humor throughout (“My father was born for safe-housing illegal migrants…he fell upon our new houseguests with all the bonhomie of a Sandals Resort manager, bearing three buckets of fried chicken and a bottle of rum”). But just as often her prose is choked with clichés—“With a thunder crack, in a perfect display of pathetic fallacy, the clouds split.” And while the novel provides a much-needed view into the many double binds of illegal immigration, it also, troublingly, seems to prop up stereotypes. At one point, Yola curses her “inability to thwart all those genetically wired impulses that allow pop culture to accurately peg Latin women as 'feisty,' 'fiery,' and 'mothafuckin’ crazy as shit.' ” Really?
An intriguing premise turns disappointingly banal.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982128-91-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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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