A well-imagined and disquieting set of works that will stay with readers.
Crime novelist Danenbarger offers an eclectic collection of short stories.
On first examination, darkness seems to predominate in this wide-ranging set of tales. “The Yellow Butterfly” and “Grace” feature abrupt car accident deaths, and suicides occur in “It Means a Lot to Me” and “The Remainder.” Small ripples of light eventually emerge, although sometimes they trail a potential tragedy. For instance, an electrical fire brings together a researcher and an emotionally fragile and isolated reference librarian in “Alexandria: Her Smile a Pulchritudinous Dawn.” An elderly musician in “The Composer” is still creative, despite the challenges of old age. “One Day in the Universe” captures the dichotomy of light and dark that washes over all of Earth’s inhabitants as Helen, a former cosmologist now residing in a retirement home, contemplates her life: “We are tiny specks on a tiny planet, orbiting a tiny star…. All my life, I have stood mired in perpetual awe and dismay.” Interpersonal relationships in these stories are often difficult and painful, and some characters instead turn to the nonhuman in their search for connection; magician Mitch talks to a hand puppet in “The Child,” and an autistic girl’s best friend is a cat in “Death of Angst.” Much of the action plays out in characters’ minds, but Danenbarger beautifully incorporates a sense of place, when needed. In “Seduction,” Richard, who’s from a small town, looks out the window of his 15th-floor Kansas City hotel room; below, “traffic moves like silent fish in illuminated streams. On the sunbaked Kansas farm of “It Means a Lot to Me,” “crickets’ and grasshoppers’ reverberating applause” sounds. Overall, these tales effectively provide portraits of varied points of view, although his protagonists share a complicated and unsettling way of looking at the world, often changing their mind too late. The feline narrator of “Death of Angst,” for instance, doesn’t quite grasp the concept of love, but as he approaches death, he lovingly helps his teenage owner.
A well-imagined and disquieting set of works that will stay with readers.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781953639226
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Circuit Breaker Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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