A sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter take on family dynamics.
Attenberg follows the women of one family for almost four decades, exploring how each woman’s self-image and ambitions impact—and are impacted by—the others.
In 1971, the Cohens spend Saturday nights as a family playing Scrabble in suburban Chicago. Ailing Holocaust survivor Rudy loves his family but maintains a separate, private life. His wife, Frieda, struggles with anxiety and insecurity. Mild-natured 16-year-old Nancy knows she will always be less special than her brilliant, emotionally intense sister, 12-year-old Shelly. With Rudy’s early death a few years later, the family splinters. Frieda moves to Florida and spirals into alcoholic poverty. Shelly becomes a rising star in Seattle’s tech startup world. Nancy quits college to have a baby, embracing the debatable security of a shaky marriage. Careerist Shelly cannot relate to defensively domestic Nancy, and both avoid contact with troubled Frieda. In the years that follow, the women’s professional and emotional trajectories twist and turn in predictable yet sometimes surprising ways. Nancy’s daughter, Jess, grows into a young woman more comfortable in her skin (literally, given her tattoos) than her forebears and becomes their point of connection. While Attenberg organizes the narrative around vaguely ironic subject headings—“Affairs,” “Emergencies,” etc.—her message is clear: Belonging to a family can be redemptive, whatever its deficiencies. Sexual identity and secrecy are other major themes. Undercurrents of romantic love between women sprout and flourish, while male characters fare badly. Only Rudy, whose homosexuality remains a secret until uncovered by Shelly and a delighted Jess years after his death, is lovable. The straight men are detestable. Both Nancy’s husband and Shelly’s boss do considerable harm thanks to “wandering dick disease.” Shelly’s husband is an obnoxious irrelevance. Attenberg can be harsh; her wry authorial voice creates an emotional distance even from the women, as do her occasional asides telegraphing the future. But the vicissitudes of her characters are undeniably absorbing.
A sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter take on family dynamics.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780063039841
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
