A fascinating historical drama.
In Bockian’s historical novel, a young woman in 17th-century Italy sets out to learn what really happened after her beloved brother is murdered.
In the year 1672, Yehudit Baldosa Parenzo is a widow in her mid-30s living in the Ghetto of Venice (located in Italy’s Cannaregio district and currently considered the oldest Jewish ghetto in the world). Her world crumbles when she discovers that her beloved brother, an unassuming merchant named Mordechai, has been found dead with his throat slit and his body burned. Obsessed with finding out who murdered her brother and why it was done, Yehudit plunges into an increasingly labyrinthine investigation that takes her through Mordechai’s last days. Uncovering his involvement with an increasingly fractured “Garden” group that regularly debates holy texts (“It often seemed to him that in the layers upon layers of texts and commentaries, the practice of explicating words was as central to Ebraismo [Judaism] as the belief in one God”) and his apparent plan to run away to Amsterdam with his courtesan lover, Yehudit is left to wonder: How well did she really know her brother? And what barriers is she willing to break in order to find and speak the truth? Bockian crafts an intricate story set against the backdrop of the arrival of Shabbetai Tsvi (a man who claimed to be the Messiah) and the revolutionary writings of the “heretic” Benedict Spinoza. The author compellingly contrasts Yehudit’s personal journey to resilience and personal strength with her brother’s experiences (via flashbacks) as they both push back against tradition. The sheer amount of historical detail makes for a dense text that may overwhelm more casual readers, but the story (based on true events) includes enough twists and turns to move forward at an engaging pace. With a capable narrative voice that explains without lecturing, Bockian effectively explores timeless themes of religion, family, and societal expectations.
A fascinating historical drama.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798218667931
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Künraht Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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 satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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