An affecting novel of female friendship and a desire for independence.
Brown’s debut novel tells the story of a Black wife and mother in 1920s Harlem who yearns to be a writer.
Cora James got to know a young Langston Hughes through her job at a Harlem library, and after he goes away to school, she begins a correspondence with him in which she confesses her ambition to become a full-time author herself: “Part of the pain of hell for me is I don’t think I’m being who I need to be,” she writes. Soon after their letters begin, Cora must help her cousin Agnes by reluctantly taking on her job as a cook for the wealthy, White Eleanor Fitzgerald.In the Fitzgeralds’ kitchen, she surprisingly finds some quiet time to write as she works. When Eleanor discovers Cora’s love of literature and writing, she offers to be her patron and take Cora with her to her house in upstate New York for the summer, so that she can write uninterrupted. Brown, the founder of Georgia-based press Minerva Rising, presents a mix of diary entries, letters, and short stories written by Cora—and sometimes fictional material by Hughes—that creates an immersive world, exploring the literature of the Harlem Renaissance and ideas of contemporary authors, and, ultimately, explores the central character’s identity as a Black woman. Overall, this is a powerful novel that offers excellent historical details, but its discussion of poetry and novels are its highlights. By rooting the novel in domesticity with well-developed female characters, Brown speaks to timeless struggles of women who had ambitions that reached beyond traditional expectations. Moreover, Brown crafts Cora as an incredibly perceptive narrator and foregrounds race-related issues through an absorbing plotline with some unexpected turns, showcasing the importance of intersectionality.
An affecting novel of female friendship and a desire for independence.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77133-851-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
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 virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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