Clever storytelling with an over-the-top protagonist.
A frustrated young man mulls his many mistakes.
In New Jersey in 2000, Tony Mazza (like matzah, only not, ha ha) stumbles out of a courtroom, wondering where he’s gone wrong in his life, and his narrative provides a thousand answers ranging from funny to sad. He relates his life in reverse: 2000 becomes 1994, then 1991 and so on, going back to his birth, which Mom fills him in on. Tony can’t keep even an entry-level job, as reporting to work on time at IHOP is a nagging issue. Surrounded by bad influences like his father and his lifelong friend Sandy Quade, he screws up by the numbers but only blames himself: “Where did I go wrong?” he asks himself over and over. In 1990, “the unemployment rate’s low enough for you to step over,” and yet he’s “thirty-one, divorced and jobless.” Loser isn’t tattooed on his forehead, although readers may wonder why not. Along the way, he peppers his narrative with lame jokes. “I know a bunch of jokes about being unemployed. But none of them work. Ha ha ha.” At times it feels like Tony has memorized his childhood joke book and wants to share every damned gag. (One or two fewer groaners would’ve been nice.) But then lines like this more than compensate: “That voice, sweet with an edge, is like orange juice left out too long.” Typical Tony: He makes a date with a girl and then forgets to show up. In high school he’s casual about punctuality, arriving at “Ms. Rosen’s Western Civ. class in time to be fifteen minutes late.” He could be a decent student—for example, his comments in English class about Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye are perceptive: “It’s what Salinger thinks a rebel kid should be.” And yet a quiet tragedy lurks in the background of the Mazza family’s lives. Tony’s younger sister, Angela, has been missing for two decades, and all hope of finding her is lost. When the story circles back to 2000 no one is looking for her anymore, and Tony faces possible jail time on a low-level drug charge. One thread leads to a shock, the other to a glimmer of hope.
Clever storytelling with an over-the-top protagonist.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781646035861
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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