Faithful to the spirit of Dickens, this engaging tale gives two neglected characters their due.
A fictional memoir reimagines Dickens’ holiday classic A Christmas Carol.
Few stories are better known than that of Ebenezer Scrooge, the misanthrope who, thanks in large part to the ghost of his partner, Jacob Marley, is redeemed. Readers all know Bob Cratchit (and Tiny Tim) and even Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, who will not give up trying to cajole his uncle back into the human race. But in this telling, in the form of Fred’s memoir, Marley does not die. Instead, after he gets himself in deep trouble, he and Ebenezer successfully stage Marley’s death, and he decamps to America. It is no spoiler to say that Fred’s version also ends well, with the transformed Scrooge whom readers have all come to adore. Scrooge then devotes his life to promoting good causes and preaching the gospel of loving one’s fellow man. And Fred’s memoir reveals what really happened that fateful, magical night that changed Scrooge forever. In terms of period details and customs, Dickens would surely approve of Rapier’s retelling. A difference is that readers get a much fuller picture of Fred, a real mensch, and Marley, a livelier and more outgoing character than his friend Ebenezer (which leads to his downfall). An intriguing point about young Fred is that early on in his marriage to the lovely Emily, he almost stumbles into the Scrooge trap: Emily wants a baby, and Fred desires just a little more money, just a little more security first. A close call. But with the exception of one tight year, the couple’s Christmas party with its silly games is a treasured tradition for all their friends. Thus does the eternal struggle between grasping and giving play out. And readers learn in this enjoyable story that Scrooge was not Fred’s uncle’s real surname but one of those inspired Dickensian eponyms. An afterword by Fred’s son, Ebenezer, ties all the loose ends together in a fashion that Boz would applaud.
Faithful to the spirit of Dickens, this engaging tale gives two neglected characters their due.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-937937-24-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twin Oaks Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
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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