Patient, perceptive, and charged with a quiet emotional power.
In Bender’s historical novel, a sensitive girl awakens to her spiritual gifts in late-19th-century New York.
In 1896 13-year-old Ambrétte Memenon, the daughter of French immigrants, is newly arrived in Utica, New York, and resides in the first residential home in the city to get electricity. Her father, referred to as Papa, is an electrical scientist who has worked with some of the greatest minds of his generation, including Nicola Tesla. Her mother, called Maman, believes in spiritualism—she’s convinced that “spirits live around us, just as neighbors do. The dead are near us at all times.” Ambrétte’s older brother, Georges, works alongside their father and is gradually maturing into adulthood. Ambrétte feels disconnected from her surroundings and senses a deep rift between her parents—in a recurring metaphor that draws upon her parents’ interests in electricity and spiritualism, she longs to be the conduit that reconnects them. Ambrétte begins preparing for a séance that she hopes will reveal her link to the spirit world (she communes with ghosts) and bring positive attention to her mother. Maman becomes sick, suffering “spells” that she believes are the result of “an animal spirit deep inside her,” leaving her increasingly bedridden. In the wake of this illness and several profound losses, Ambrétte must determine how her spiritual gifts will help her find a place in the world. While the author mostly sticks to a close third-person perspective following Ambrétte, the text also includes intriguing ephemera like excerpts from Maman’s spiritualist texts, a short story shared by a maid, and a note written by a friend. In keeping with the spiritualist theme, the story moves fluidly through time, jumping backward on several occasions to fill in the story of the Memenons (in particular, Papa's history as an electrical scientist). Bender gracefully conveys how the currents of the times and the influence of parents shape a young mind, and in Ambrétte the author has created a memorable character.
Patient, perceptive, and charged with a quiet emotional power.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781952600708
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Whiskey Tit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 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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