An engrossing social tapestry, filled with quiet spiritual dramas.
Subtle moral conundrums stir this luminous saga of genteel Southern society in the mid-20th century.
Traywick’s loose, episodic tale follows a sprawling cast of characters from World War II through the mid-1960s as their lives are changed or upended by the inscrutable workings of fate. At one focus is the family of Thomas Strikestraw, an Episcopal minister in a small North Carolina town who likes to confound his flock with mildly heretical sermons. His son, a naval officer, disappears under circumstances that implicate him in a German spy ring. At the other focal point is the Ashfield clan, aristocrats of South Carolina’s Low Country, along with their African-American companions in the Gadsden family, whose daughter, Lilia Belle, is raped by a congressman. Around these poles orbit neighbors, friends, small-town eccentrics and several isolated subplots that gradually weave themselves together, including a man who wakes up with amnesia aboard a U-boat just as it’s captured by the British and a World War I veteran who, having survived one calamity after another against all odds, decides he’s destined to never die. The novel treats its characters’ travails with serene equanimity. Estrangements, crimes, miscarriages and deaths violent or tranquil are folded calmly into the narrative flow, their consequences surfacing only much later in musings on religion and ethics or in surreptitious acts of generosity and honor. Traywick’s richly textured prose creates a fictive world that’s almost Faulknerian in its density, revealing to the reader a burnished, elegiac view of upper-crust Southern life on the cusp of the civil rights movement—a gracious world of plantations, glamorous balls, weddings and shooting parties. For now, racial tensions are muted and salved by humane courtliness. Traywick’s vision is limited—almost cloistered—and so meditative that it seems detached at times, even though it sheds a captivating glow.
An engrossing social tapestry, filled with quiet spiritual dramas.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1440126390
Page Count: 312
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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