Masterful portraits of women’s lives, only half lived.
Three generations of women are tied by blood, marriage, and a slow-burn disappointment in life.
A kind of existential crisis simmers in each of these 12 chapters—which could be read individually as short stories—traversing nearly a century of American life. The book begins in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1971 with Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner, uncomfortable in-laws-to-be, at the marriage of their children Tom and Ruth. Their silent ride to the flower shop for the wedding bouquet sets the tone for decades of a relationship based on competition and mutual disapproval. Flashes of their girlhoods, affluent and tragic for Helene, hardscrabble and transgressive for Evelyn, offer a backstory to their middle-aged unhappiness: “They are widows who lie in bed terrified that they are lost in their noisy days and their noisy, pointless lives and that they are missing everything that matters.” Ruth and Tom’s only child, Francie, brings some flashes of joy, but Francie is troubled by anxiety, which progresses to drug addiction. Much of the sadness of the novel comes from the characters’ inability to access their own selves—Helene and Evelyn seem trapped in performing a womanhood they have no interest in, and then the pain of such strangled identities is passed on through the generations in the form of perpetual criticism to the querulous and underachieving Ruth and painfully self-conscious Francie. There are some arresting vignettes: Evelyn develops a friendship with a neighbor’s child, who steals small, inconsequential things from her apartment; Helene attends a self-help class but is so discomfited at sharing in the circle that she invents a more interesting self to present. The novel ends with Francie approaching middle age, and finally happy—a triumph for all of the women before her.
Masterful portraits of women’s lives, only half lived.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668078969
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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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