A playful comedy that delivers more silliness than outright laughs.
A fast-food mogul desperately yearns for respectability and is willing to do extreme things to get it in Schmidt’s farcical novel.
By all objective measures, Phil Ochs is a successful businessman. Despite descending from a “pedigree of losers,” as he thinks of it, he’s built a fast-food empire in South Carolina, made up of 17 Fry Buddy franchises. Nevertheless, he remains dogged by the feeling that he hasn’t received the respect he deserves, and he remains annoyed by the fact that he shares a name with a famous liberal folksinger—a terrible yoke for a “committed conservative”: “You don’t know the burden it’s been to drag that hippie’s weight up the ladder.” To make matters worse, he longs to win the Outstanding Entrepreneur award from the Chamber of Commerce; this year, he’s losing out to a company that produces fake testicles for neutered pets. Frustrated that his adult son, David Samuel, is, in his view, an “over-sensitive, disgraceful goddamn mooch,” he pays a teenager to beat his offspring up, hoping the experience will usher him into manhood. David Samuel’s fantastical depiction of the assault is among the farce’s comedic highlights, as when he imagines his assailants’ thoughts about him: “His grace intimidates me! Me too! Even a thug like me can feel the elegance of his spirit! The devil has presented us a martyr for our adolescent rage, our wild, brutish passion!” Phil finally decides to run for state senate, and uses that opportunity to reinvent himself, allowing voters to come up with a new middle name for him. The entire book is written with nimble enthusiasm, and some of it is very funny, indeed. However, the author’s comedic stylings can hit lower registers at times, as with some of the middle names that the public suggests, such as “Phil Mummy-Fart Ochs,” “Phil Dinosaur Ochs,” and “Phil R.I.P. Ochs.” Also, the book’s inventiveness unfortunately fizzles out long before its conclusion; one may wish that the author had set about crafting a novel that was half as long.
A playful comedy that delivers more silliness than outright laughs.Pub Date: May 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956769-13-5
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
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