Labari writes with candor, but she doesn’t have much to add to the communal conversation about mothers and mothering.
An autobiographical novel about motherhood by a Spanish journalist and fiction writer.
The narrator was in her 30s when she decided she wanted to become a mother. After several years and multiple rounds of IVF treatments, she achieved her goal—and found herself ambivalent about the result. She discovered, for example, that motherhood is time consuming and doesn’t leave room for much more, especially when children are very small. She struggled with breastfeeding and baby-wearing. Much of what she describes will be familiar to many mothers, as well as to anyone who has read about motherhood. The narrator doesn’t seem to have thought about motherhood until she became a mother herself, and she writes as if she is just discovering motherhood as a social construct. It’s possible that this is a matter of cultural difference—this book certainly made a splash in Spain—but American readers interested in critical takes on motherhood are unlikely to find much new here. When Labari is actually inventive, she is often bewildering. The chapter “On Horseback or In Diapers” begins with the narrator imagining a new father going to the store to buy a superhero cape and ends as a riff on Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” In between, she muses about whether playing with dolls as a child prepared her for being a mother. Labari spends no time developing any of these disparate parts, and there is nothing essential or revealing in their juxtaposition. In another chapter, the narrator quotes Penélope Cruz rhapsodizing about motherhood and goes on to say of the actor that she “has quit weaving her shroud and no longer waits.” Of course this is a reference to the Odyssey, but what is it supposed to mean? If there’s some connection between Odysseus’ wife and the star of Vicky Cristina Barcelona besides a shared name, Labari does not reveal it. The most affecting portions of the book are the ones in which the narrator describes how motherhood changed her relationships with her own mother and grandmother. These sections benefit from a simplicity and specificity most of the book lacks.
Labari writes with candor, but she doesn’t have much to add to the communal conversation about mothers and mothering.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64286-072-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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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