A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.
A young gay man confronts his town and its history in the fourth novel in the Croy Cycle series.
It’s 1970, the summer before basketball star Jake Jacobs’ senior year, and he’s just passed on a chance to spend it in Paris, France, with his thespian mother. Instead, he wants to remain in Croy, Oklahoma, where he moved two years ago. Things aren’t quite what they used to be—his friend and old crush, Randy Edom, hasn’t been around since he graduated and inherited a large sum of money—but Jake’s best pal, Joanie Tibbits, is still around. He also has a new flame, Beau Hamilton, a sensitive musician who enjoys secretly wearing women’s undergarments. Together with other friends, Jake and Beau form a rock band called the Quirks—a nod to its members’ idiosyncrasies—and find cathartic musical expression for their angst. Joanie, the editor of the school paper, launches an investigation into a controversial sculpture that once adorned the local library. Why was it removed, and what became of it? Randy returns home to take care of his ailing mother, Virginia, and come to terms with some family history that he’s ignored for too long. The era’s cultural upheavals also begin to manifest in the town’s social life: Young men are coming home from Vietnam with unspoken horror stories locked up in their injured bodies, and many in Croy are unwilling to accept loves and lifestyles that don’t conform to conservative Christian morality. Jake has just one year left in town, but is that enough time to put its ghosts to rest?
Over the course of this novel, Ceci effectively infuses the prose with the well-developed personalities of its characters, as when Randy visits his sick mother: “Virginia smiled like she’d just awoken from a good dream. She waved one of her IV lines. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ ‘Does it kill the pain?’ ‘No. It just sets it in a corner.’ ” At another point, the work gets across the exuberance that the characters feel when performing music: “Jake grinned and covered his ears. Belle looked like she was howling, but he couldn’t hear her.” Although the previous two books in the series worked well as stand-alone YA novels, this one relies more heavily on storylines established in the earlier volumes; as such, fans of the Croy Cycle are sure to appreciate this latest entry, but new readers would do well to catch up with previous books first. Overall, it feels less like a standard YA tale than a larger story of small-town life and the interactions of families that have deep, interconnected roots. As in the previous entries, there’s a queer coming-of-age storyline, but here, it’s somewhat diluted by other, less urgent plotlines. For example, the library sculpture seems to hold a lot of metaphorical weight, but the reader may have trouble getting too invested in its fate. (Crosby’s occasional black-and-white line drawings feature characters and objects from the text.)
A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73473-897-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Les Croyens Press
Review Posted Online: April 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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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