Poignant, fresh, and often devastating.
A 12-year-old girl struggles to come of age in the wake of personal tragedy in 1970s Brazil.
“They took Mita away in the month of Ruby, and now we are in Sapphire.” Dolores Hamilton keeps time using her beloved birthstone calendar, marking off the days since her parents sent her identical twin sister, Mita, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, to live at a hospital in their father’s native England. Since Mita’s departure, Dolores and her parents have moved from their small town of Santanésia, Brazil to the high society of Rio de Janeiro. Dolores has had no formal schooling and can’t read or write, and now she’s sent to the British school against her will. There she tries to find her place among girls who whisper about her behind her back and teachers whose cruelty is only thinly veiled. Dolores’ desperation to express her feelings about the loss of her sister is hindered by her inability to write; nor can she speak of Mita with her parents, who turn away from any mention of their missing daughter. The loss of Mita is made all the more gut-wrenching as scenes from the twins’ childhood in Santanésia are woven throughout the novel. In Rio, Dolores slowly finds community through a new friend, Andrea, and a sympathetic teacher who helps her learn to write. Now Dolores can send letters to Mita, but when months go by without a response, she vacillates between worrying that Mita hates her or, perhaps worse, has forgotten her. Faithfull seamlessly blends Dolores’ personal journey with an occasionally scathing portrayal of life in Brazil in the 1970s, particularly through the story of Sofia, a trans sex worker who befriends Dolores. While Faithfull’s novel is filled with multilayered characters—with the exception of Dolores’ mother, who sometimes falls flat—it is Dolores’ reckoning with the loss of her other half that is the heartbeat of the novel: “Now, when I look in the mirror, I just see me. It used to be Mita there, looking back at me. So much has changed.”
Poignant, fresh, and often devastating.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217153886
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thousand Voices/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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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