This well-told tale with rich prose and relatable characters is a good primer on Ukraine.
Two Ukrainians struggle against the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Even after the USSR craters, Ivan fears that spies lurk behind him. “Don’t look for shadows behind your back,” a friend likes to say. Ivan and Phoebe fall briefly in love, if that’s what you can call it, and marry. Ivan is reluctant about the match to start with, but he gives in to family and social pressures. It’s a mistake from the get-go. Phoebe’s real name is Maria, but her chosen name alludes to Phoebus, the Greek god of poetry. Before the marriage, she’d lent Ivan a floppy disk with all her poems, which he neither cares about nor ever returns. Perhaps he sees in her poetry the key to Phoebe’s developing into her own person, which would endanger his dreams. He will provide for them—he has a plan. Phoebe becomes pregnant with Emilia, whom they both love, but Ivan refuses to allow her to do anything but stay home with in-laws who can’t stand her. She gets clear second billing both in this novel and in life—Ivan dreams of a better future for himself but prohibits Phoebe from pursuing her love of poetry. In the story’s most telling line, “he shared his parenthood with Phoebe—Phoebe about whom he could not imagine talking to anyone at all.” So while she's stuck at home, Ivan goes out into the local world trying to find a decent job. Meanwhile, Ivan laments his lack of control over life after communism. He and Phoebe played bit parts in the political upheaval and struggle for democracy but remain far removed from influence over Ukraine’s future. Yes, they’d once been part of history, two people among thousands protesting in the Maidan, Lviv’s main square. Ivan feels that but for the protests by him and his comrades in arms, the Soviet Union would still be “alive and well.” But now what? Both husband and wife are trapped in a societal collapse and its painful rebirth, and they don’t even have each other for solace.
This well-told tale with rich prose and relatable characters is a good primer on Ukraine.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781646052622
Page Count: 425
Publisher: Deep Vellum
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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