The literary equivalent of a Minnesota hot dish: decent, tasty comfort food.
Something old meets something new in a melodrama with DNA testing as its deus ex machina.
Baker’s latest begins in an orphanage in 1924 Chicago and hopscotches its way around the country and through the years to a climactic scene set in that city almost a century later. Though Cecily Larson’s mother tells her she’ll be back within a year when she drops the little girl off at the institution in the opening scene, three years later Cecily has turned 7 and no mama has appeared. So—the orphanage sells her to the circus! Where she will be trained as an acrobatic bareback rider! Meanwhile, in an alternating series of chapters set in 2015, Cecily is a woman in her 90s living in a small town in northern Minnesota. She has a daughter named Liz, who has a daughter named Molly, who has a son named Caden (definitely a little hard to keep straight)—and Caden wants to do his honors biology project on DNA testing. Ruh-roh, thinks the alert reader, seeing something coming in the distance, which becomes even more discernible when new chapters begin to follow a second mother-daughter group on the East Coast. After a while, you feel just like the people in the book: When the heck are those DNA results going to arrive? While it’s a little trying to wait so long for the fuse to blow on all the secrets and lies and underhanded dealings, it turns out we don’t know the half of it. As a rule, an amazing DNA-reveal story needs to be true to be really interesting...but if you’re going to make one up, this one’s a doozy. Baker’s re-creation of circus life, tuberculosis-sanitarium life, and home-for-wayward-girls life in the 1920s and ’30s is well researched and punchy, while the 21st-century Minnesota storyline is perhaps a little droopier. But those test results are coming, and so is the big shebang.
. The literary equivalent of a Minnesota hot dish: decent, tasty comfort food.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780063351196
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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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