A warm and remarkably funny book about death and caregiving that will make readers laugh through their tears.
A woman takes care of her dying best friend while handling her own messy life.
Edith and Ashley have been best friends for most of their lives. They’ve been there for each other during their greatest joys and struggles—marriages, infertility, and raising children. Now, though, Ash has to support Edi through their greatest, most heartbreaking challenge yet—Edi’s death. When Edi’s ovarian cancer progresses to the point that treatment is no longer an option, they decide she should stay at a hospice near Ash’s home in Massachusetts, leaving Edi's husband and young son back in Brooklyn. Ash spends most of her time in Edi’s hospice room, bringing Edi the food she requests, talking to the nurses, and handling an environment that is both horrifically bleak and hilariously odd—Fiddler on the Roof blares from one resident’s room every afternoon, as if it’s the soundtrack to everyone’s death. But as Ash takes care of Edi, she also has her own chaotic life to worry about. She has two lovely, nearly grown daughters whom she adores. She has a complicated relationship with her ex-husband, whom she never technically divorced and who spends most of his time at her house. And she’s sleeping with several people who are either on Edi’s care team or in Edi’s family, which leads to some awkward situations. Ash makes for a unique and easy-to-love narrator, one who jokes about her own self-centeredness even as she devotes her time to helping her best friend. Newman is frank about the physical reality of cancer and explicitly shows how grueling it can be to care for a friend while watching them die—there are falls and tears, leaking tubes that soak Edi in bile, and gradual changes to Edi’s appearance and mental state as the end draws nearer. As Ash says, “It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.” But Newman is also open and honest about how joy can commingle with grief and how happiness and gratitude can coexist with sorrow: “Life is just seesawing between the gorgeous and the menacing—like when you go for a run and one minute the whole neighborhood is lilacs in purple bloom, and then the next it’s stained boxer shorts and an inside-out latex glove.” Newman perfectly captures the beauty and burden of caring for someone in their final moments while showing the gift of Edi and Ash’s once-in-a-lifetime friendship.
A warm and remarkably funny book about death and caregiving that will make readers laugh through their tears.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-323-089-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
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