A gripping tale of marital difficulty intertwined with pallid love affairs.
A widow haunted by the tragic end of her marriage gets her groove back while on a Scottish sojourn in this knotty romance.
Six months after her husband Marc’s death from complications of a stroke, 40-something Wisconsin novelist Heather Finch embarks on an eight-week retreat in Scotland to finish her latest Millicent Monvail mystery and reconnect with John Timmer, an old middle school flame and current sky diving instructor who lives nearby. As she says goodbye to her college-age kids—Jackson, a kindly organic-farming enthusiast, and Tessa, a perpetually put-out handful—Heather’s story splits into two interleaved narratives. One is a love triangle at the White Cottage at Scotland’s Ardorn Estate, where Heather is wooed by John, who takes her strawberry-picking, and by Ardorn’s owner, Steven Connolly, who wines and dines and beds her with satisfactory, though not earthshaking, results. Mild spookiness occurs when she starts dreaming of a ghostly, blood-drenched woman, hears strange clinking noises, and finds her poetry book mysteriously moved around her cottage. The second, darker subplot revisits the three years that Heather, Jackson, and Tessa took care of the once-strong but now helpless Marc after his stroke. The burden exhausts them and is further complicated when Heather discovers that Marc was cheating on her; as his condition worsens, she confronts the agonizing thought that his death would be a relief. The two threads of Benjamin’s tale of midlife rebirth sit uneasily beside each other; Heather’s romances feel conventional and somewhat callow (“he leaned in, his lips at her left ear. ‘I’m going to slow dance with you tonight, my Swan Princess,’ he said”). However, Benjamin’s depiction of Heather’s family life in extremis is far more convincing, as in sharply etched scenes of mother-daughter conflict or passages of bleak endurance: “ ‘I’m fine. I’ll be down in a bit.’…Her head spun, but she drank again. Another drink. Another year. Another bathroom visit with Marc unable to care for himself.” As such, Benjamin’s portrait of Heather’s marriage has a raw emotional power that the ensuing Scottish flings can’t match.
A gripping tale of marital difficulty intertwined with pallid love affairs.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© 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.
