A set of colorfully written short works that seem to work best in isolation.
Tuft, a retired Presbyterian minister and mental health counselor, blends fantasy and reality in an eclectic short story collection.
These tales introduce readers to a world of fantasy and biography through accounts of a wide range of characters, auspiciously intended for an audience of “human beans and other perishables.” The book features dozens of brief stories, each about a different person or situation, but all bound together through common themes of religion, health, or medicine; some share a common Pennsylvanian setting. Each ends with the phrase, “Words are magic, and writers are wizards”—an intriguing repetition that leads readers to contemplate that the stories are somehow interconnected; the phrase also ends the preface, which offers a bit more context on the sentences that follow: “I write because I have to, I cannot not write. Stories are in my blood.” The book’s greatest strength is Tuft’s rich, memorable imagery, as in “Sea of Lonely”: “The young boy clutches his father’s hand as he dodges the wheelchairs filled with wispy-haired gnomes who make feeble gestures as they reach to touch him.” The author’s vivid language allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the worlds he constructs or retells from his past, as in “Ginny,” a story about a 90-year-old-woman with dementia at an independent living facility where the author also resides. The weakest aspect of the collection is how it jumps around interrelated themes; at times, readers may find the stories to be a bit hard to follow and may puzzle over how a particular tale relates to others, such as “Johnny Smoke” and “The Black Mile,” which each feature very different experiences of a veteran of the Vietnam War, or “The Green Dot,” “Knights of Fantasia,” and “Plant a Sticker,” each of which centers on an image of someone reverently placing an object or mark on another person’s forehead. As such, readers may get the most out of these stories by approaching each as a unit rather than collectively, which makes their individual charms more apparent.
A set of colorfully written short works that seem to work best in isolation.Pub Date: July 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781666779127
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Resource Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
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
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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