Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.
A Black Latina lawyer represents patients at a New York psychiatric hospital while struggling with the aftereffects of her own past trauma.
Johnson’s debut opens with a bang. In the midst of consulting with a new client, Vivian calms a troubled teenager who has just slashed a nurse with a knife. Outwardly she's cool and professional, but once the incident is resolved successfully, Vivian inwardly crumbles, and we soon learn that she's saddled with deep-rooted emotional problems. Haunted by dark memories of childhood sexual abuse, she holds herself together in a state of hypervigilant awareness of possible male violence. A simple subway ride turns into a terrifying adventure in which she’s “besieged by animal fear." Vivian can only relax when she’s smoking weed with her best friend, Jane, who also survived a dysfunctional, abusive family. A dreaded family reunion in which Vivian’s worst fears are realized drives her to a dramatic decision. Will it bring the healing Vivian craves or spiral her further down into a nervous breakdown? While Johnson’s theme—how unresolved personal traumas can cripple a life—is compelling, her execution is marred by clunky prose that makes it difficult to connect with the story (“There was something about shallow clichéd lyrics combined with a sweeping sonic landscape in the sterile setting of a CVS, Duane Reade, or Walgreens that always moved her in a Don DeLillo way”). In trying to capture her protagonist’s anxious and obsessive state of mind, the author often gets bogged down in details that disrupt the narrative flow. An entire paragraph describing calorie counts as diet-obsessed Vivian agonizes over which snacks to purchase doesn’t make for compelling reading. Aside from brutally honest Jane, who calls Vivian out on her self-absorption, the other characters are barely fleshed out. And strangely, the novel hardly delves into the abuse at the core of Vivian’s troubles. Her abuser is simply called “the violent man.”
Buried under excess verbiage, there's a thoughtful novel struggling to come out.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-26423-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
PERSPECTIVES
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