A riveting new story about an abiding atrocity.
Indelible characters bring to life the drama of bitter survival in colonial Virginia, indicting a society of enslavement and dehumanization.
In this epic tale of early America, abolition is still generations away. Half a dozen disparate characters, Black and white, converge into a center in which they will have profound and often shocking effects on each other’s lives. The novel begins in 1692: open season on Africans for kidnapping for wealth extraction and forced reproduction in the brutal Virginia Colony. As the narrator observes with typical bluntness: “All slaves were vulnerable, women more than men, children more than women, little girls more than all the rest.” One of those little girls is Bless, a great character in a constellation of well-crafted people who make do with the family they’re given and long for the people they’ve lost. Bless has the curdled privilege of being a rich girl’s plaything; later, the reader will learn about outdoor labor: “Field hands had to pluck the worms and grind them beneath their bare heels.” Perry’s descriptions are cinematic, and the dialect is evocative without being grating. She makes reverent nods to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and evokes the rooted magic of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. The white men who buy humans and give orders are sometimes well established in the colonies—or like Jack Crewe, they are “the bartered class” of despised immigrants. They, too, have a price, and can’t afford to be sentimental. Perry’s intimacy with the period is palpable, and readers will gain greater knowledge of daily life under slavery, especially the monstrous glossary around the cold assessments of Black bodies. Some slavers flatter themselves: “Benjamin fancied himself a benevolent master, a caretaker to a rude and backward people.” Laws shift here and there, and we meet Black men who believe they are free. But white people, grasping to climb the next rung of the ladder, break their promises. By the end of the book, it’s an utter surprise what fate appears to unfold for the children of both striver Jack and survivor Bless, who has had to make the hardest decisions of all. Perry takes the long way home, following rich scenes with a slightly distanced narratorial explication that at first may seem redundant. Why show, then tell? It’s a congregation’s call and response. This history must be retold lash by lash, scar by scar, victory by victory, along with the reminder that systematic cruelty is codified, modeled, and taught.
A riveting new story about an abiding atrocity.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781324105978
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
