An enjoyable read with a strong protagonist and a trove of historical nuggets.
A historical novel follows the early life of an Irish girl who immigrates with her family to New York City.
In 1889, 7-year-old Rose O’Brien travels to Dublin and steps aboard the Furnessia steamship, bound for a future that promises new opportunities. Her father, Charles, has already made the trip, and now she, her mother, and her three younger brothers are about to join him in New York. Charles meets them at the Castle Garden immigration center—Ellis Island will not open until 1892—and brings them to a Manhattan tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. The family rejoices in the reunion, and Rose begins to make friends with the ethnically and nationally diverse immigrant kids in the area. (Her “building was filled with children of all ages….They tumbled down the stairs and sat on the stoop.”) Rose meets young Anthony Vigliano, who lives in her building and will become pivotal in her life. Then, just a few months after the O’Briens’ arrival, the “Russian Flu” brings tragedy to the family when Rose’s mother succumbs to the raging virus. Fortunately, Jenny Himmelfarb, a woman working with the outreach program run by the Neighborhood Guild, comes into their lives and arranges for Rose and her eldest brother, Maurice, to register for public school. Himmelfarb’s continued involvement with the family opens the door to the children’s integration into American life. McCann’s gentle novel is narrated by Rose in a charming and optimistic voice supporting women’s equality that carries a tinge of Hallmark gloss in the descriptions of the opportunities offered and successes achieved by the immigrant kids in her circle. The narrative moves pleasantly and episodically through a decade and a half of Rose’s growth into womanhood. Although light in significant dramatic tension, the tale richly overflows with everyday details of turn-of-the-20th-century life in New York, including the social and political movements of the period. And despite Rose’s commitment to becoming a nurse—which, according to the standards of the day, means remaining single and chaste—her budding romance with Anthony keeps the story intriguing.
An enjoyable read with a strong protagonist and a trove of historical nuggets.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2022
ISBN: 9780578273464
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Hazel Wand Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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