A lively on-the-road novel with lighthearted—and existential—moments.
An understated, quietly humorous yarn about a young man on the run in 1967.
Lee Clarke doesn’t ever get to the Kansas town of deWitt’s title, one of the few places he doesn’t hit on his peregrination from Los Angeles to his hoped-for destination of Canada. He’s been kicked out of UCLA after punching out a smug fellow student, one of his girlfriend Cal’s circle, “a sleazy group, druggy and dark in the eyes, clad in scarves and leather, generally nihilistic in their worldview, and terminally unimpressed with the ample sunshine their location afforded them.” His student deferment has thus been rescinded, and he’s been called up prematurely in error, which his draft counselor shrugs off: “a discussion regarding the subtle yet in this case significant difference between strange and wrong is hard to parse in the din.” Determined to dodge the draft and avoid a trip to Vietnam, he hires on to drive a brand-new Jaguar to New Jersey after an odd interview that concludes, “The owner would rather not have his car be party to anyone’s existential quest.” Lee’s route is circuitous: He drives to Washington state to visit his alcoholic father, to Montana to see his mother, to Duluth, Minnesota, to see an estranged brother with a penchant for phoning in bomb scares, and to New York to visit his unlucky-in-love sister, driving there “at an even eighty, experiencing pulsing surges of deranged happiness followed by plummeting moments of terror and abhorrence.” DeWitt doesn’t ever make quite clear whether Lee has principled objections to the war; he seems mostly to drift through life, pleased to settle in with a six-pack when not tinkering with his car, and his family is much more interesting than he, each in their own way. Pleasingly, though, his story ends on a relatively happy note in, of all places, a bowling alley across the snowy line.
A lively on-the-road novel with lighthearted—and existential—moments.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780063438118
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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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