Other people write with words; Landis seems to write with mercury.
A dazzling cycle of stories revolving around a complicated, fascinating, talented young badass.
You have to hand it to Rainey Royal, a character who will not be denied. She came into the world a friend of the protagonist in Landis’ 2009 debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This. By 2014, she’d gotten herself a whole book, titled Rainey Royal, of course. Now she’s the point around which a volume billed as the third installment in the Rainey Royal Cycle revolves. The stories here span the years from 1947 to 1987 and add depth to characters and events introduced in the earlier books, though it’s not strictly necessary to have read them. The first story, "La Nounou," peeks into the childhood of Rainey’s father, Howard, during a summer he spent in Paris in the care of a reckless nanny. “Howard Royal, eleven and two months, sat on his parents’ bed and watched his nounou at his mother’s dressing table draw a ruby lipstick over her opulent lower lip. His own mouth hung open, a chalice of joy and shock.” This way of using words almost like gems is Landis’ trademark. The title story is next, starring Rainey’s aunt Laurette Barbanel back in 1959, when she’s the 23-year-old minder of a stroke victim whose blossoming bruises indicate something very bad about her husband; unfortunately, the only word left in the woman’s brain is “Wunderbar!” We see Rainey for the first time in the third story, “Embouchure,” set in 1969, and get to know Howard as the extremely louche jazz musician he grew up to be. In subsequent stories, we encounter Rainey as a talented but self-destructive artist with a broken moral compass. Subsequent stories follow the long trail of abuse Rainey endures as a preteen as well as the complexities of her relationship with her mother, who abandons her to join an ashram. In “Mr. Apology,” a story set in 1980 about a (real-world) art project in which anyone can leave a message apologizing for something they’ve done, Rainey says she isn’t sorry for a gunpoint robbery she and her best friend pulled off as teens; she definitely hasn’t aged out of her badness. Her current project is making tapestries festooned with tiny objects she’s stolen. That Rainey.
Other people write with words; Landis seems to write with mercury.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781641297325
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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