A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.
A historical romance focuses on the construction of the Erie Canal.
In this attractively designed reissue of Casey’s 1988 novel, A Land Beyond the River, the action opens in 1810, when the United States is already straining its boundaries and yearning to stretch out west. One avatar of that dream is New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton, who wishes to orchestrate the building of a great waterway extending west of the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The author vividly conveys the somewhat grubby passion that motivates Clinton, a combination of vision and avarice that he’s well aware can only come to fruition with the cooperation of a grand alignment of social, political, and financial powers throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond. He has ideas along these lines, too, but he also faces a major obstacle, and it’s not the impenetrable wilderness between him and his destination. It’s the young and ferociously ambitious future president and Tammany Hall operator Martin Van Buren, who wants to scupper the project for his own reasons. In Clinton’s search for allies, he seeks to enlist two key figures: the wealthy, influential widow Eleanora Van Rensselaer and the wily, rough-hewn ship captain Daniel Hedges. As the story gains momentum, the growing challenges of planning and erecting the Erie Canal are joined with the looming threat of a renewed war with Britain. The tale follows its tight central cast of characters through the War of 1812, with the tensions of the narrative coming to a head.
The main frictions of Casey’s story derive not from the work of engineering or the cultural expansion of the plot but from the more personal facets. Eleanora has a scandal buried in her past linked to her deceased husband, and Clinton’s clashes with all the political characters in his path feature bristling personalities. Aaron Burr, for instance, is “far too slippery,” and Clinton angrily refers to Van Buren as “the bastard son of an innkeeper.” These personal elements electrify the narrative. They make the story so compulsively readable that they entirely vindicate the author’s decision to give the book an attractive cover and reissue it for a new readership. Casey has a remarkable ability to bring alive the daily life of the Hudson Valley at the beginning of the 19th century and to invest all these well-known historical figures, like Burr and Van Buren, with flawed, three-dimensional qualities. In fact, the novel’s only noticeable flaw is the imbalance between the two narrative emphases: Alongside the richly textured historical figures, Daniel and particularly Eleanora often seem thinly contrived and stereotypical. The author’s skill at dramatizing the Byzantine politics behind financing and constructing the Erie Canal is so pronounced that most readers may find themselves wishing he’d stuck to that and left the romantic plot on the drawing-room floor. And curiously, despite what seems like the narrative’s best efforts, the standout character is easily Van Buren—probably a first for American fiction.
A meaty, enjoyable drama about the personalities clashing over the building of the Erie Canal.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73436-662-4
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Diamonds Big as Radishes LLC
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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