A cartoonish but entertaining sendup of modern life and its discontents.
A self-conscious puppet struggles to become a real man in this raucous satire.
Fleming’s fable unfolds on the planet Urftoo, which has a purple sun, a religion based on the orgiastic worship of a Christ-like lobster, and an economy run on the labor of sentient puppets. When puppet-maker Miltro Miggugen dies from eating a poisoned pistachio made by the Power Chemicals conglomerate, his creations, including a wizard puppet, a dinosaur puppet, and a urine-scented ant puppet, must fend for themselves with nothing but couch-stuffing to eat (and then vomit). Thrust to the fore is straight-arrow engineer puppet Felty FuzzPalace, who leads the others against attacking birds and human thugs who threaten to sell the puppets for scrap to pay off Miltro’s debts. Felty’s maturation accelerates when he meets a “squishy”—a silicone-bodied sex puppet—named Stephy, who demonstrates that sex and other emotionally fraught experiences can temporarily turn puppets into humans. Enjoined by Miltro’s bathroom-dwelling ghost to avenge his death, Felty takes a job at Power Chemicals, where the novel turns into a broad, jaundiced spoof of the corporate world, complete with an executive who’s literally an empty suit. Felty’s sense of engineering rectitude is offended when he’s tasked with designing a substandard plastic lid for machinery that makes a dangerous neurological drug—but he finds that his body is now attached to puppet strings hanging from the office ceiling and labeled “mortgage,” “fatherhood” and “promotion,” which make him unable to resist the company’s directives. Fleming offers up a colorful fantasia that feels like what would happen if Franz Kafka and David Lynch teamed up on a reboot of The Muppet Show. It’s dedicated to making the mechanisms of bourgeois conformism, which rob people of individuality and integrity, luridly visible, and the author shows a rich comic inventiveness in his puppet’s-eye view of the world. He also presents a brilliant vernacular that mixes grandiloquence with banality: “Good and evil: outmoded fairy tales sung by the weak and the lethargic in the throes of a drunken, ill-DJ’ed karaoke party.” The result is a vigorous, if not exactly subtle, social critique and an imaginative picaresque.
A cartoonish but entertaining sendup of modern life and its discontents.Pub Date: May 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9891247-6-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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