A thin and dreamy but accessible parable of a man coming to religious awareness.
A man searches for God in Wehmeyer’s Christian-inflected novel in verse.
In the year 1425, a serf feels the urge to walk away from the brickyard where he works, carrying nothing but a hickory staff, a satchel, and the clothes on his back. He travels without any particular aim, meeting people and seeing sights he doesn’t understand. What does a washerwoman mean when she tells him that “a journey is a container”? Why did a puppeteer at the crossroads compare him to one of his marionettes? He may not know the answers, but these interactions have the man asking progressively bigger questions. Eventually, he decides he must find God, which turns out to be easier said than done: “ ‘To walk toward God,’ the brewer explained, ‘you walk toward understanding and compassion.’ / ‘But I don’t understand anything!’ / ‘What you say is true,’ said the brewer, / ‘That is a good beginning.’ ” As the protagonist wanders, questions, and learns, he hopes that he’s nearing the end of his quest. Little does he know that an ending is just another beginning. Wehmeyer relates the pilgrim’s story over the course of 86 poem-length chapters, each broken into lines and stanzas: “In front of a letter writer’s shop / there was a man / reading a large book. / He asked, “What are you reading?’ / ‘A treasure book,’ was the reply. / ‘What is the treasure book named?’ / ‘The book of many books.’ ” The author cites the ancient Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers as an inspiration for the novel’s format, and there’s certainly a meditative, self-contained quality to each chapter even as they successfully build on each other to form a larger narrative. The Christian themes aren’t subtle, precisely, but neither are they overly dogmatic in their presentation. Fans of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) and similar works of bare-bones philosophy will be likely to enjoy Wehmeyer’s take on Christianity’s teachings.
A thin and dreamy but accessible parable of a man coming to religious awareness.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 9781664245303
Page Count: 144
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
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
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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