A delightful, richly detailed set of stories.
Cody spins linked tales of mountain-town life in this collection.
It’s 1999, and in the small Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, the old and the new brush up against each other in uncomfortable ways. In “The Wine of Astonishment,” a minister sets out on a winter night to deliver some news to the estranged sister of one of his parishioners. On his way up the mountain, however, he picks up a hitchhiker, who, at the point of the knife, redirects the course of the minister’s evening. In “Overwinter,” a college professor gets snowed in at home on the same day his wife was planning to leave him for a new man. He can’t deal directly with his collapsing marriage, however, because he must try to find a way to keep the senile woman next door alive when the power goes off. A girl and her great-grandmother sit on their porch in “Conversion,” watching men turn the old church next door into a mosque; it isn’t long before some locals in pickup trucks come to start trouble with the new neighbors, and the woman and girl are eyewitnesses. In these 12 tales, which span the 12 months of the year, Cody documents the cycle of death and life in a colorful American town. The author’s prose is precise and frequently surprising, alternating between moments of peril and humor. “When Dr. Brian Anderson used up his last breath on a moderately difficult ascending passage in Gaubert’s Nocturne and Allegro Scherzando and fell over dead…the Department of Music at Runion State University—for the first time in forty-one years—faced the task of finding a new Professor of Flute.” The stories all sing on their own, but it is in the harmonizing of characters and events as they appear in multiple tales that the real joy of the collection is found. From intimate moments of personal crisis to communitywide occasions, such as those found in the rambling “Decoration Day,” Cody effectively captures conflicts of American life at the turn of the last millennium.
A delightful, richly detailed set of stories.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942-01-666-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pisgah Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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