A striking celebration of cinema’s power and a chilling acknowledgment of its limitations.
The latest graphic novel from Burns follows a group of young white suburban friends, centering on the sputtering relationship between a warm, friendly redhead and the awkward artist making her the focus of his new story.
Brian would rather sit in the kitchen and draw tentacled aliens than join the party out in the front room. But when Jimmy, his longtime home-movie collaborator, casts Laurie, a new addition to their friend circle, in their next 8 mm film, Laurie’s warmth and beauty tempt Brian to step out of his mind and fully into the present. Brian’s art (ranging from the uncanny to the explicit) and the fleeting moments of connection between them keep Laurie in Brian’s orbit, and the story alternates between their perspectives, capturing both Laurie’s sense of isolation when Brian gets lost in his appreciation for and creation of movies and Brian’s bittersweet awareness of his drifting, ever-creating mind. As Brian attempts to translate the strange visions in his head (and sketchbook) into a science fiction film shot with friends at a secluded cabin, he sinks deeper into his cinematic escapism while Laurie engages with more immediate pleasures. An aura of horror infuses the pages, with bulbous aliens floating through blue skies and raining down mysterious capsules, dead-eyed stares and skipped medication setting nerves on edge, and time’s unyielding march robbing even pleasant moments of lasting significance. Burns’ clean lines, heavy shadows, and rich colors sumptuously convey the pebbled texture of alien flesh and the rolling waves of Laurie’s hair, while his dialogue and narration crisply capture everything from flirty, friendly banter to awkward and painful self-analysis. His paneling swiftly moves the story along, through both slice-of-life moments and fantastical worlds, occasionally juxtaposing character moments with shots from the films Brian loses himself in, evoking the massive gap between fixation and passion.
A striking celebration of cinema’s power and a chilling acknowledgment of its limitations.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593701706
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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