A worthwhile addition to the Blackbeard canon.
There’s always room for another treatment of the Blackbeard story, especially with two worthy adversaries.
The early 18th century was the great age of piracy in the Caribbean and off the East Coast of America. The most notorious of those pirates was Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. On the other side was Lt. Robert Maynard, of the Royal Navy. Doggett’s historical novel begins as Maynard and his superior, Capt. Ellis Brand, have been ordered to find and arrest the brigand and end his reign of terror. To sweeten the pot, the King has decreed that pirates who abjure their wicked ways within a year will be pardoned. (At one point, Teach raises the possibility of a pardon to his crew but backs down.) We first meet the pirates at New Providence, their “capital” in the Bahamas. Pirate Woodes Rogers has accepted the pardon and been named governor of those islands. When he sails in to take up his protective new position, the pirates give him a fiery welcome and go off a-plundering. Blackbeard, with his captured French slave ship now christened the “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” along with his confederate Richard Richards captaining another “Revenge,” eventually make their way to Charles Town in South Carolina, blockade the port, and bleed the town dry of its treasure. Now Brand and Maynard are more determined than ever to catch their quarry. Eventually, off the coast of North Carolina, there comes a showdown, Blackbeard and Maynard, mano a mano, and the decks become awash with blood. History buffs will know the end result, but there are no spoilers here. Blackbeard says, prophetically, “Your name will be known only because of mine, Mr. Maynard.” Teach was an actual, historical, person and tailor made for the character that we know: a larger-than-life man who played the part of a demon from Hell so well that his prey usually gave up without a fight. His fate, ably told here, is very fitting. Doggett knows the pirate idiom well and creates some nuanced characters, Blackbeard the most fascinatingly realized of them all.
A worthwhile addition to the Blackbeard canon.Pub Date: April 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798321225110
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
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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