An uneven novel that offers a whimsical reflection on a free-wheeling youth and a sobering testament of abuse.
Debut author McCrary offers a novel about the daily struggles of four siblings and their unstable mother.
Life isn’t easy for the Phillips children in 1970. They’re a tightknit unit from a working-class family in a small Michigan town,and they’re all too aware that people gossip about their mother, Didi, behind their backs at the local beauty parlor. Didi is epileptic, prone to violent mood swings, and frequently institutionalized; her presence in her children’s lives is one of barely restrained chaos, swinging from indulgent affection to physical assault. The Phillips kids have had to learn how to disarm, avoid, and escape their mother to protect themselves and one another. In the words of McCrary’s 9-year-old narrator, the world of 1970s rural America bursts forth in vivid color. It’s a whirl of wondrous adventures and escapism told in loosely connected vignettes. Recurring themes include the harrowing reality of the mother’s illness and the intergenerational pain that plagues her family. Through assorted, third-person flashbacks to her mother’s upbringing in Nazi Germany, McCrary attempts, with mixed success, to paint a fuller picture of Didi and the tragedies of her life. The sections about Didi feel oddly removed, as they lack the specificity of the first-person experiences and rely on distracting, unnecessary injections of German in dialogue. Ultimately, the reader never gets a full sense of Didi’s personality beyond her trauma, nor a deeper understanding of her experience with psychosis. Still, McCrary’s skill is clear in her exploration of grief, neglect, and family loyalty, as when the narrator discusses her father and finds refuge in memories of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “I knew he was losing his patience with our mother. I also knew that telling our mother to calm down wasn’t going to go down well. I bowed my head and started singing quietly to myself. ‘Who can turn the world on with her smile?’ ”
An uneven novel that offers a whimsical reflection on a free-wheeling youth and a sobering testament of abuse.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-757-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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