Sharp, beautifully textured writing.
A young girl growing up in the Bahamas in the 1970s must navigate obvious and hidden dangers alike in Justicz’s novel.
Twelve-year-old Domini Dawes, known to her friends as Dede, is a white English girl who lives in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. The novel opens with her pinned to a boat in fear as a storm rages all around her. The story then backtracks to describe Dede’s life prior to becoming lost at sea, a life in which she already appears to be cast adrift. Her mother’s boyfriend, Silvio, is reputed to be “moving drugs” and shows little interest in her. Her mother, Anita, is a croupier who leaves Dede to her own devices each evening while she works at the local casino. Bullied at school by Jethro, the son of a bigwig politician, Dede has few allies. Johnnie McGuinn, the building manager at her apartment complex, seems to be one of the few people who are eager to spend time with her, but McGuinn has an unhealthy interest in prepubescent girls. Ethel Edgecombe, a sage Bahamian woman who also lives in her building, keeps a watchful eye over Dede, but McGuinn is intent on worming his way into her confidence. Frustrations at school, coupled with the sickening desires of the building manager, lead Dede to take a boat and head recklessly out to sea. She finds herself washed ashore on a strange island and under the guardianship of a woman named Harmony Knowles; Dede is unsure if Harmony is a figment of her imagination or real. Will Dede make it back to Freeport, and will the men in her life pay for the damage they have inflicted on her?
In this finely crafted novel, the author effortlessly builds complex psychological portraits of her main characters. Dede is ferociously indignant yet childishly naïve, particularly when unwittingly renaming her predator, “Johnnie Angel”: “Mr. McGuinn. It’s my nickname for him. He’s always sunburning his forehead.” In the character of McGuinn, Justicz convincingly takes readers into the revolting mind of a pedophile: “The bra she now wore; her breasts had grown in the past three months, and she was shaving under her arms. If she hadn’t already, she’d soon go through the change that ruined them all.” The novel presents a nuanced treatment of complex themes, from male domination of women to issues of racial inequality. When Ethel, a Bahamian by birth, recalls attending university in England, the slur “over-sized darky” remains with her. Yet she also feels like an outsider attending an upscale event in Freeport: “Still trying to impress a social club that had no room for the likes of her.” Justicz also has a captivatingly unique descriptive style: When Dede grips the armrests of her chair in anguish, the author notes: “If she squeezed any tighter, the truth would come out of the furniture.” The final part of the novel, which revisits the Bahamas in the 21st century, unnecessarily tries to tie up the loose ends a little too tightly—but the book’s conclusion presents some unexpected twists that are definitely worth waiting for. A stirring celebration of strong-minded women, this is a superb offering by a truly talented author.
Sharp, beautifully textured writing.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781959984115
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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
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