A convincing portrayal of the lives of Icelandic women during an important period in the country's history.
Award-winning Icelandic novelist Baldursdóttir's story of a woman's struggle to become an artist in the early decades of the 20th century.
When the widow of a fisherman lost at sea moves her six children from rural western Iceland to the city of Akureyri, it's in order to educate not just her sons, but her daughters as well. It's 1915, and Icelandic women have just been granted suffrage: "This new era will bring women brighter days. We can get educations, and we can vote." After a harrowing boat journey, Karitas, the artistic youngest daughter, is put in charge of her little brother and the household chores while the others go out to work. Told mostly in third person, with short sections from Karitas' point of view, the novel depicts their time in a saltfish warehouse and their longing for dry feet and leather shoes during a winter so cold the urine freezes in the chamber pot. A rich neighbor arranges for Karitas to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Returning after five years, she tries hard to create a life as an artist even after getting pregnant and moving to a turf-and-stone farmhouse with her fisherman husband. She fights with her highhanded spouse, hides from elf women, makes art when she can, despairs: "Was she focused on art, after all—or were there artists who thought of clotheslines?" But the true heart of the book belongs not to its eponymous heroine but the strong-willed women of Iceland generally. Life here is hard, death swift and ubiquitous. Through every loss and setback, the brutal winters, the months the men spend at sea with the fishing fleet, the women endure. As Karitas' mother says: "We fight, we Icelanders, we fight.”
A convincing portrayal of the lives of Icelandic women during an important period in the country's history.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2707-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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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