A startling and rewarding story of pain and alienation.
In Ambrose’s novel, a Black gay man with bipolar disorder navigates a mental health system and financial troubles.
One day in 2010, in Norristown, Pennsylvania,Bowie Long, still dressed in his pajamas, went to visit his mother at work at the county administration building with the intention of asking her for his check from Social Security; then, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, he tried to kill her. Now he’s in a state mental facility, where he’s never been before:“The state hospital was the place of last resort. The place for the true loons. Or those that didn’t have insurance to pay for anything else. There were no perks here.” The 32-year-old Bowie was diagnosed with bipolar disorder years ago and has long heard voices in his head. He’s soon let out of the hospital, but this just puts him back into his chaotic home life. He and his mother, Magdelene—who quickly forgives him for trying to murder her—are both gambling addicts, and often spending their scant money on the slots at the local casino. Bowie isn’t above doing sex work here and there to make a couple extra bucks, as well. At home, though, his mother berates him constantly and makes him uncomfortable by frequently being naked in his presence. The only bright spot in his life is his sometime-lover, Eden, a compassionate man who desperately tries to save Bowie from bad choices. As Bowie navigates the mental health and legal systems during one crisis after another, Eden attempts to help him deal with a childhood trauma that might be contributing to his problems—but, Bowie wonders, is he simply too far gone to ever lead a normal life?
Over the course of this novel, Ambrose shows himself to be a terrific writer on the sentence level, capturing Bowie’s claustrophobic, paranoid existence in a way that will keep readers on their toes, as when Bowie rages against his keepers at the state hospital: “After the tenth hour, he did what it seemed they had been waiting for. He leaped up, screaming, and threw a chair. They descended like night, pinioning him beneath their weight, ignoring his outbursts, his demands to go home.” Bowie is a memorable protagonist, and Ambrose elegantly brings this sympathetic and deeply troubled man to life. Magdalene is a brilliant villain, whom the author portrays as just as psychologically complex as her son. The novel is a bit too long at nearly 400 pages, as the ups and downs become a bit repetitive over the course of the work. However, it remains a breathless read, effectively capturing the messiness of mental health and the maddening bureaucracy of the system in place to treat mental illness. It also demonstrates how traumas and living conditions can exacerbate one another, keeping a person trapped in a cycle of ill health and poverty. Overall, it’s a story that truly fixes the reader in the chaos of another person’s mind.
A startling and rewarding story of pain and alienation.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-938841-97-2
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Jaded Ibis Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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