An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.
A troubled teen experiences the freedoms and dangers of 1960s California youth culture in Isaak’s coming-of-age novel.
It’s 1969, four years since Rick Leibnitz’s mother fled their Redlands, California, home, taking his younger brother and sister away to escape beatings by Rick’s father. Fifteen-year-old Rick and his father have long “discarded any pretense of trying to get along.” His father tries to forcibly cut Rick’s long hair and reveals that Rick is his “only son.” For Rick, it’s an epiphany: “I almost laughed. The way I felt about him, how could I blame her? I’d leave me too.” Later, Rick is sitting outside his house when 17-year-old Stacy Slater, one of many girls who star in his masturbatory fantasies, stumbles up to a neighbor’s door. After no one answers, Stacy and Rick go to a nearby orange grove, where he loses his virginity to her. Stacy asks Rick to stash her drugs, and he gets picked up by the cops shortly thereafter. Sent to juvenile detention, Rick refuses to rat on Stacy and again resists getting a haircut. Leo Malheur, Rick’s “tall and coal-black” probation officer, brokers his release, although Rick’s father, who has moved to nearby Yucaipa, now plans to send Rick to military school the following year. Lincoln Ellard, a charismatic classmate at Rick’s Yucaipa school, helps Rick avoid this fate. The boys get a house together, where Lincoln leads intellectual “salon” discussions and lets Rick in on his drug running operations. Rick enjoys a psychedelic summer of sex and drugs until trouble arises, leading to another jail stint and new information that inspires him to hit the road to reconnect with his mother.
The articulate and introspective narrator observes and engages in a “trippy” world reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, substituting the groovy late 1960s for the go-getter 1980s. As Rick muses at the end of the novel: “There were sick people among us, just as in any other generation, and hair and clothes and attitudes and drugs for them were nothing more than disguises they had donned. What had been glorious craziness in the summer looked more like actual madness in the fall.” The book packs a lot of characters and subplots into its pages, including finely etched moments focused on Rick’s probation officer, who strives for justice, is subject to racist remarks, and is in danger of being drafted. Lincoln is a marvelously drawn flawed-prophet figure who ultimately realizes he’s been “dangerously naïve.” The narrative very effectively captures a male teen’s sex-on-the-brain obsession with girls yet also fleshes out its female characters with thoughts and problems of their own. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a “pulling a train” event (group sex with one female and multiple male partners taking turns) at a party and the subsequent perspectives of both the girl involved and the girls who watched it happen.
An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781958840047
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Utamatzi Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
