A raw, unsettling, and sharply observed narrative of domestic violence and resilience.
In Black’s novel, a young woman grapples with marriage, motherhood, and survival in the shadow of domestic abuse.
Kim MacLean is a promising law student whose life unravels when her husband, Larry, reveals a capacity for violence early in their marriage. Black wastes no time confronting readers with brutality (“he swung his arm from the shoulder like a baseball bat, palm open, and hit me in the face”) before immersing them in Kim’s fractured daily life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As Kim tends to her infant son, Nathan, she struggles to reconcile the devoted athlete and scholar she once admired in Larry with the manipulative, volatile man he has become. The episodic structure moves between crises and attempts at normalcy—frantic late-night phone calls, a chipped tooth disguised as an accident, visits to a Native American acupuncturist in Tahlequah, suffocating family holidays where silence weighs heavier than truth. Black uses these episodes to chart Kim’s bruised body and trace her shifting psychology. “With strangers, I could be strong. With Larry, I was a cripple,” she reflects, highlighting the juxtaposition of strength and vulnerability that drives the novel. As Larry’s cruelty escalates, Kim clings to small acts of resistance, like the comfort of her cello, the laughter of friends, and the fleeting relief of imagining alternative futures. The law student in her catalogs evidence of “good signs” and “things to think about later,” even as the woman in her fears she will never find escape. The author delivers a candid, quietly devastating depiction of domestic violence. The pacing occasionally sags under repetition that mirrors the cyclical nature of abuse, but Black’s spare, unsentimental prose sustains the tension. The Tulsa setting, with its cottonwoods along the Arkansas River and withering storefronts, underscores the collision of outward normalcy and private collapse. Not offering a neat resolution, Kim’s story echoes the ambiguity of lived experience.
A raw, unsettling, and sharply observed narrative of domestic violence and resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798990418028
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Four Elk Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
