Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.
Honey can be a salve or a sweetener but, as Han illustrates so vividly, not all wounds can be healed by the oft-employed Korean folk remedy.
Han explores the dehumanizing practice of sexual enslavement in a narrative that employs realism of both the stark and the magical kind as she follows several generations of Korean women through perilous times. Beginning with the story of twins, Geum-Ja, a girl, and Geum-Jin, a boy, born in a mountainous region of Korea in 1902, Han traces the increasingly malignant effects of Japanese occupation. Thirteen-year-old Geum-Ja, who mysteriously disappears from the family’s compound one night, assumes the form of a tiger and exerts power and protection over her family in that guise. Geum-Jin grows up in her absence and goes on to get married and father three children, but his family is brutalized by Japanese soldiers in a raid on their home in 1931. The only apparent survivor is his daughter Song Young-Ja, whose heartbreaking story forms the core of the saga. A childless couple opens their home to Song Young-Ja but she is molested by the husband and then sent away by the wife. A demeaning job in a teahouse—a hotbed of gossip and espionage—evolves over time. Still, Song Young-Ja’s constrained but relatively safe existence comes to a cruel end in 1941 when she is captured by Japanese soldiers and transported to a camp where women serve as sex slaves. Her experiences are brutally recounted in corrosive detail. Song Young-Ja subversively employs her own supernatural ability to incorporate her emotional state into the foods she prepares but still suffers incalculable harm. Decades pass before the injuries suffered by the enslaved women are publicly acknowledged. It is with the aid of Song Young-Ja’s young granddaughter—who harbors a mysterious ability of her own—that she begins to confront her past. Han has incorporated extensive research into a revelatory work of harrowing fiction.
Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781668202166
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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