Atmospheric and beguiling.
Old traditions and folk stories are not just tall tales in Comeau’s historical fantasy novel.
It’s the 1820s, and 16-year-old Morrigan Lane is living with her family in a small village in Ireland. With so many in her town heavily relying on fishing as both a food and income source, Morrigan dreams of sailing the sea and taking up the trade, but it’s not something women are allowed to do. While taking one of her frequent walks along the coast, Morrigan is struck by a vision of a man in a chariot with a sword at his side, calling out to her from the sea. The villagers whisper that she has seen Manannán mac Lair, Guardian of the Otherworld, one of the creatures from myths and folktales told years ago. Morrigan’s father thinks she may have “the sight,” as it runs in their family, but this will not help her in a world where women are only meant to be good Catholics and quiet wives. Worried about her future prospects and not wanting to stifle her, Morrigan’s mother sends her daughter to study with The Crooked Woman, Cathleen, who is the town go-to for remedies, medicines, and midwifery. It’s Cathleen who believes and calms Morrigan when a wolf comes and speaks to her, calling her An Fhoínse (a “spring from which the life force flows”). The Otherworld knows of Morrigan’s empathy and feeling for nature and her reverence for life, and it needs her help to flourish—but hiding her visions and calling from the Church and her frightening schoolmaster, Winnett, will be a difficult task. In this fantasy novel, Comeau uses the Irish setting—which always feels a little magical on its own—and tales of the Otherworld and Tuatha dé Danann to craft an ethereal, fablelike narrative. Morrigan, as well as her friends, family, and fellow villagers, come alive on the page, fitting perfectly into the picturesque village, a bulwark against the giant, tumultuous world around them—and the creatures that inhabit it. Morrigan’s frustration with the imposed limits on her gender adds a fascinating dimension to the spooky tale.
Atmospheric and beguiling.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781961905450
Page Count: 358
Publisher: 12 Willows Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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