Dazzling and impassioned, this novel evokes history from a perspective often overlooked—that of its survivors.
Two friends grow up in Saigon during the height of the Vietnam War, but follow very different paths in the war’s aftermath.
In 1966, Mai is 13 years old, leading a pampered existence in a traditional Confucian household in Saigon. In spite of daily media reminding her that her country is at war, Mai is largely sheltered by both her privilege and a willed propensity to “[remember] what she wanted to remember.” Such is the power of Mai’s determination that, in spite of the powerful impact of witnessing a monk self-immolate in protest against religious persecution and the bombing of Saigon in 1968, her adolescence is largely untroubled until she accidentally witnesses her father seducing his young student Mai Ly. Mai responds by entering into her own sexual liaisons with gleeful abandon, specifically with the American soldiers who hang out on Catinat Boulevard. Unlike Mai, Mai Ly had a childhood defined by privation. Her mother was killed in a hit-and-run accident when she was 4 and her father's family was massacred in My Lai, potentially by the same G.I.s who now frequent his street-corner beer stand. In 1975, the fall of Saigon finds Mai abandoning her baby in an orphanage as she flees on one of the last helicopters out of the city. Meanwhile, Mai Ly, who has served as a spy and armed combatant for the Viet Cong, returns to her home in triumph, ready to celebrate their liberation with a people who, shockingly to her, do not feel liberated at all. As the aftermath of the war unspools, the novel follows the fortunes of Mai; Mai Ly; Michael, one of Mai’s G.I. lovers, who's African American; their son, Nat; and many others as they navigate futures which must be lived in the light of their complicated pasts. This book is a capacious read but its conversational style, evocative characters, and penchant for very short, episodic chapters keep the reader from feeling bogged down by either the heft of its pages or the ambition of its scope.
Dazzling and impassioned, this novel evokes history from a perspective often overlooked—that of its survivors.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781771838276
Page Count: 467
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
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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