Readers will enjoy this tense, atmospheric family drama.
In Peck’s coming-of-age novel set in 1956, a New Jersey girl struggles with family relationships while on vacation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Every year, Weston and Lydia Grainger take their two daughters, Lily and Dodie, to Cape Cod for a long vacation from a blistering New Jersey summer. Weston, a mild-mannered graduate student, is the opposite of his wife, Lydia, who was born the only child to a wealthy, well-established New England family that valued tradition and etiquette over family ties. This long history of excessive concern about propriety and appearances has turned Lydia into a humorless and often insensitive mother. In contrast, Weston is bright, engaged, and eager to pass on his scholarly enthusiasm to his daughters. Weston’s efforts are successful with Dodie, who’s studious and high-achieving but proud and somewhat cold like her mother. Lily, the story’s 11-year-old narrator, shares her father’s rambunctious spirit but her musical talents likely come from her mother, a born pianist. Readers first encounter the Graingers as they make their regular summer trip, but there’s one noted difference: Despite their modest means, they’re building a house across the lake from Weston’s overbearing brother George’s sprawling home. George is intent on discrediting and lording his privilege over his brother, and on embarrassing his meek wife, Fanny. The couple’s children, Nicole and Digory, each take turns bullying their cousins, with Lily getting the brunt of the abuse. This sometimes folksy, other times stressful coming-of-age story shows how personalities can clash within a family. Peck creates a lively, compelling narrative by deftly choosing to track the story’s progress as one would track an impending storm. As the summer wears on, so does a sense of impending doom surrounding Hurricane Carolyn, which provides nature’s response to the growing tension between and among the various family members, bringing the story to a fever pitch in the last few chapters: “Everyone hoped the storm would miss the Cape and blow itself out to sea. But just when we began to think we could relax, Carolyn veered.”
Readers will enjoy this tense, atmospheric family drama.Pub Date: May 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798986567686
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Sea Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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