A richly described but sometimes-unconvincing tale of a piano prodigy.
As a cicada brood emerges, dramatic events swirl around a musically gifted girl’s life in this debut historical novel.
Growing up in Providence, Georgia, narrator Analeise Newell and Etta Mae Johnston are childhood friends. Analeise, 11, recalls that their mothers met “packing pickles into jars at the Mayfield Pickle Company, my Mama at the white table, and Etta Mae’s at the colored.” Ever since Etta Mae’s mother died, she’s been raised by her grandmother Miss Wessie, who looks after the two girls when Grace, Analeise’s mother, is at work. As for Claxton, Analeise’s father, he’s usually drunk. It’s the summer of 1956, 13 years since the last cicada brood hatched, and now the insects are returning, littering their shells everywhere. Ominous currents begin swirling around Analeise, a natural piano virtuoso. She tastes music, feels burning pains in her legs, and detects a meanness inside her. She becomes jealous of Etta Mae’s singing success and deals with Claxton’s sudden death. Analeise also develops a strange fascination for the wealthy, charismatic Mayfields and their haughty, underhanded daughter, Marlissa. Although warned away by Miss Wessie, Analeise becomes drawn into the Mayfields’ web of hidden truths and ruthless manipulations until—as the town is mobbed by cicadas—a maelstrom climax reveals long-kept secrets. In his novel, Gwaltney assembles some classic ingredients of the Southern gothic tradition, with Analeise’s world being haunted by death, madness, the past, and the supernatural. This can become over the top even for the genre, particularly in the extended and histrionic denouement, but the eerie tone is well orchestrated for those who appreciate a sinister frisson. Still, Analeise’s final certainty of personal, deep-down badness seems overstated compared to her actual actions. Similarly, the book reaches sometimes for the portentous, as with Analeise’s (rare but normal) synesthesia.
A richly described but sometimes-unconvincing tale of a piano prodigy.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2021
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
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