A sweeping tale that offers lessons from the not-so-distant past.
Doll presents a historical saga of labor unrest, criminality, and political persuasion.
San Jose, California, known as “the Garden City,” is struggling during the Great Depression. The fruit and vegetable processing industry serves as the area’s main economic driver, but recent wage cuts have cannery workers poised to go on strike. Best friends Amelia and Victoria work on a cannery assembly line, thanks to Amelia’s well-connected bar-manager father, Angelo Gumina—the second-in-command to mob boss Gaetano Ferrone—who used his influence to secure them summer jobs. They soon find themselves fired up by activism, attending meetings and demonstrations to protest unfair wages and poor treatment at work. To evade police after a demonstration turns ugly, the girls seek refuge in the Rosen Department Store, owned by Alexander Rosen; Victoria meets Alexander’s son and heir, Michael, who’s known as “the scion of San Jose,” and their association leads to Michael being kidnapped and held for $40,000 ransom. The pressure to solve the case increases when Bureau of Investigation agent Louis Cooper gets involved, sue to rumors of mob involvement, and conflicting accounts of what really happened to Michael emerge. The apparent lack of progress in the case brings things to a fever pitch. Meanwhile, influential real estate magnate Thomas Ripley, who has the ears of both the mayor and governor, has his own agenda that involves obtaining more power, more land, and more money. Over the course of this intricate tale of politics, corruption, and shifting alliances, Doll delivers a fast-paced work of historical fiction that takes full advantage of its Prohibition-era California setting. The farming community is effectively shown to be beset by unrest, greed, and scandal, and the shifting plot will keep readers on their toes. Overall, the work has a cinematic quality, but it’s always firmly grounded in elements of real-life history; as such, it serves as a cautionary tale on how social disparities and anti-immigrant bias can be manipulated to fuel the evil plans of powerful people.
A sweeping tale that offers lessons from the not-so-distant past.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798888248072
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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 flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
