A story of rich potential that falls short in the execution.
A retelling in contemporary Manhattan of the romantic quadrangle from Henry James’ The Golden Bowl.
Like James, Smith opens with a prenup, signaling the tangle of relationships that antedate the marriage in question. Henry, a wealthy widower, is giving away his only daughter, Emily, to Federico, an Italian prince with few euros to his name. Federico, unbeknownst to Emily, preceded their romance with a serious affair in the arms of Christina, who knew Emily in boarding school and is invited to her wedding. Not coincidentally, Christina and Henry eventually connect and marry, while she and Federico reopen their affair. Even married, Emily remains deeply attached to Daddy, who buys her and the prince a house three blocks from his own Manhattan mansion. “Are you with me so far?” as the Eagles ask in “Life in the Fast Lane.” The plot moves inexorably toward the discovery of infidelity, borrowing “some of the storyline and the structure” of the James masterwork, as Smith writes in an endnote. She avoids James’ painstaking psychological dissections in favor of mullings in the close third person. And she largely avoids letting this frazzled quartet’s shenanigans degenerate into soap opera. But the novel suffers from repetitions, clunky prose, and a tendency to tell rather than show. Emily’s “full” breasts appear three times over five pages. Two women have “immaculate” posture (Christina and Federico’s mother—hmm). Emily, speaking of Daddy, refers to “the immeasurable greatness of his soul” and a few pages later to “his great, all-knowing arms.” Pity the prince: “Around Henry, Federico was literally tongue-tied.” Henry has other problems: He has “no function,” “no skills, no talents,” “no job, no obligations.” Some of this reflects a lack of subtlety, not least in Smith’s update of James’ symbolic golden bowl as a Roman jar for collecting tears.
A story of rich potential that falls short in the execution.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950994-19-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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