A heartfelt exploration of grief, friendship, and second chances.
A grieving widow embarks on the journey of a lifetime in this novel.
When Julia is awakened by a call from an ER doctor in the middle of the night, she can’t believe what she hears: Her husband, James, has died from severe injuries sustained in a high-speed car accident. Returning alone to an empty beach house, Julia struggles to make sense of the night’s events and realizes that he must have been with one of his many girlfriends. Julia’s heartbroken not only by James’s death and their broken marriage, but also by the distance that’s grown between her and her two sons. And so, when her lifelong best friends show up to help her through the funeral, Julia proposes an outlandish idea: She wants to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, 2,000-plus miles of mountainous terrain. Not wanting to let her go alone, Mary Margaret, Casey, and Nate join Julia for a journey that will test their physical and mental limits and the bounds of their friendship, revealing more than a few secrets along the way. Though a departure from Ridenour’s trademark police thriller, the novel retains a touch of her signature style through Casey, a tough-as-nails retired homicide detective. The rest of the characters are equally distinctive, all bringing their own emotional baggage and perspectives to the journey. Along the trail, the friends come face to face with their personal demons, yet they find strength in one another’s support. At the same time, each of the characters tend to reinforce their defining qualities at different points in the novel, making them archetypes rather than fully realized individuals. This impression is reinforced by dialogue that feels overly earnest, leaving little room for emotion to surface naturally and making some exchanges feel performative. Even so, the Appalachian Trail provides a compelling backdrop for the group’s emotional journey, revealing how friendship can sustain us through life’s most difficult seasons.
A heartfelt exploration of grief, friendship, and second chances.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9798897472048
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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