An unsparing exploration of the injustices wrought by misogyny and settler colonialism.
A bighearted portrait of an Indigenous woman whose transracial adoption spurs a lifelong quest to discover—or perhaps create—her identity.
Born in the 1970s to a White, unmarried teenage mother and a Métis/Cree father, Ruby is placed in foster care and eventually adopted by a White couple who “couldn’t afford to be too choosy” about the baby’s Indigenous heritage. Ruby’s adoptive father, a seldom-employed alcoholic, leaves the family when Ruby is an adolescent. Ruby remains unhappily with her mother, Alice, who makes her wear a huge hat because her skin "instantly browned up in the sun" and who won’t help her daughter research her Indigenous roots. Deprived of both her own history and real affection as she comes of age, Ruby grasps for satisfaction where she can find it, often resorting to alcohol and sex with unworthy partners. The novel is composed of chapters dated by year and titled with the names of people who have shaped Ruby, including her adoptive and biological parents, boyfriends, and social workers. The random ordering of the vignettes—ranging from 1950 to 2018—can be confusing. Some chapters are told from Ruby's perspective and involve figures in her life, while others assume the points of view of family members Ruby never meets. The chapter about Ruby's pregnant birth mother is a heartbreaking account of what happens when women lack reproductive freedom, and the chapter that follows Ruby's grandfather convincingly renders the abuse he suffers as a student at one of Canada’s notorious residential schools for Indigenous children. Sometimes the fragmented narrative is unsatisfying: As soon as one character’s central trauma is revealed, the novel moves on to another, leaving little opportunity for development. Only Ruby is fully realized by the end. But readers may forgive clunky prose and spans of exposition for the chance to spend time with this complicated character with a big laugh and a guarded but vulnerable heart.
An unsparing exploration of the injustices wrought by misogyny and settler colonialism.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44867-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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