This engrossing tale about a survivor of childhood abuse deftly depicts the healing process.
In this novel, an established romance author decides to face her past and present by writing a memoir.
In her 60s and divorced, Claire Leccese is finally coming to terms with the trauma of enduring several years of her father’s abuse and the resulting emotional effects on her personal and romantic relationships. With the support of her best friend, Guy Gaetano, and his husband, Thad, Claire starts her healing journey and moves back to Southampton, New York. Once there, she rekindles her relationship with Sydney Howard, a thriving artist who provides a safe space for her granddaughter to come out. Claire starts to write her memoir and deal with all the secrets she’s kept hidden for so long. Coccioli uses Claire and Sydney’s relationship to introduce several open wounds that haunt the protagonist’s romantic affairs. An early interaction, where readers see that Claire is afraid of being naked in front of Sydney, shows her body-image issues as well as insinuating that she won’t let him near her. Their subsequent argument exposes Claire’s “safe basics” and scars from her past relationships where “men and women had taken confidential information and used pieces of it to set off my emotional triggers and get their way.” The author’s careful interweaving of flashbacks and present-day exchanges helps readers understand Claire’s complex healing odyssey. Claire is very open about her initial lack of maternal instincts with her own children and how her granddaughter has helped her address the situation. Claire also becomes self-aware when she realizes that people around her have insecurities that they need to tackle. As the absorbing story reveals Claire’s layers of pain, Coccioli skillfully captures the protagonist’s nuanced reactions to her memories. The dissociative episodes and triggers (for example, when Sydney calls Claire baby during a sexual encounter) paint a realistic trauma response. That said, the author does not shy away from graphic depictions of Claire’s repeated abuse, which makes the book a difficult read at times.
This engrossing tale about a survivor of childhood abuse deftly depicts the healing process. (explicit, sexual assault, incest, pedophilia)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-45-684572-6
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2021
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
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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