An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.
In Land’s novel, a young man tries to access his spirituality with guidance from a teacher.
Uncanny events punctuate Gabe’s life: At 6 years old, his hand passes through a toy train he holds; a couple of years later, he floats in a vast abyss after his bedroom walls “[peel] back like layers of paper.” As the years pass, otherworldly events keep happening. Touching a heavy wooden bedframe with one finger, Gabe watches the bed easily slide over, and he walks away unscathed from the collision of his Mustang Mach II with an oncoming pickup truck. In a California coffee shop, searching for meaning in his life, Gabe encounters an older man, Elias, and feels “a hum of presence.” In subsequent meetings held in outdoor locations, such as parks, forest clearings, riverbanks, and meadows, Elias guides Gabe to an understanding of life as a game that we play many times. They consider figures who believed in themselves and overcame doubt, including Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Wim Hof, and Elon Musk. After all the dialogues, the hardest work begins: Gabe has learned the rules, but must relinquish the fear and resistance that keep him from achieving full spiritual mastery. Gabe and Elias are the only two characters in this book, and little happens in each chapter aside from conversations. The characters don’t exactly sound like real people as they constantly grapple with elevated concepts such as the soul, god, and karma, but this seems intentional. Rather than inhabiting personalities, they embody roles: pupil and mentor. More conflict might have been beneficial to the story, however, as Gabe is exceptional from the start. Land’s vivid descriptions of nature add engaging flourishes, helping to ground readers between the volleys of intense dialogue; a park where Gabe meets Elias is a “mosaic of tall trees, swatches of green grass, and gravel paths that crunched underfoot.” The text may lead readers to other thinkers (a resource guide is available at the end) while also offering inspiration of its own; the author repeats the new ideas and rules Gabe learns in easy-to-understand, bullet-pointed lists.
An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765262016
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
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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