Momplaisir has important stories to tell, but she tells them in a style that dulls their impact.
The author of My Mother’s House (2020) asks if we can escape the damage we inherit.
When her teenage son, Miles, starts misbehaving, Genevieve’s fears for his safety in New York become unbearable. She can’t seem to make him understand that Black boys don’t have the luxury of screwing up. In an effort to make him more mindful of everything he has—and everything he has to lose—she decides to take him to her family’s ancestral home. She's surprised to find herself echoing the parents she heard threatening their children with exile to Haiti if they didn’t behave when she was a girl herself, and this sense of inevitable recurrence is one of the driving themes of this novel. In addition to wanting to save her American son, Genevieve wants to rescue her cousin Ateya’s daughter, just like Genevieve’s mother wanted to rescue Ateya, and Genevieve’s grandmother wanted to rescue Ateya’s mother. Ateya abuses little Ti’Louse as brutally as her father abused her. This is a novel about generational trauma on a personal scale, but Momplaisir also depicts the entire country of Haiti as a victim of generational trauma wrought by wave after wave of colonizers. The precarious nature of Haiti’s civic institutions is laid bare by the massive earthquake that devastated the island nation in 2010. Both Genevieve and Ateya survive the initial cataclysm, but their very different fates are defined by their disparate wealth, status, and personal history. As she did in her debut, Momplaisir uses the tropes of magical realism to confront complex and troubling topics while relying heavily on exposition. And, here, the text is repetitive at both the micro and the macro levels. She piles metaphor on top of metaphor and shares the same elements from her characters’ pasts over and over again, to the point of inuring the reader to the physical and emotional violence she describes.
Momplaisir has important stories to tell, but she tells them in a style that dulls their impact.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32106-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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