An expressive set of works that offer one man’s insights into wartime service.
Flood’s posthumously published collection of stories revolves around its characters’ service in World War II.
The end of war doesn’t cancel every debt, as the characters in the late author’s tales learn, often with surprising results. Armed conflict never fails to leave its mark on all who serve, as Michael O’Reilly hears from his father in “Reunion,” before the younger man confronts a general about a grievous error that led to his capture: “War accelerates everything. Heightens every feeling. Magnifies every event. Intensifies every encounter. Destroys time.” It’s a bracingly honest yet blunt sentiment, delivered with an economical ring that doesn’t feel out of place. It’s also the type of quiet, understated style that makes these stories, written between the late 1970s and early ’80s, feel all the more remarkable. For Flood, who died in 2001, crafting them “was one way of dealing with what was left inside thirty-some years after WWII,” as stated in a foreword by the author’s son, Kevin, who edited this collection. “It took a while for [the author] to make useful sense of what had happened.” Once the author satisfied that urge, no other writings followed, but this book contains his attempts to understand, through literature, the greater meaning of his wartime experiences.
The title story turns on a deceptively simple premise, focusing on a harried insurance company owner who impulsively steals a P-51 from a county airport to relive his combat flying days: “Whatever happened when he returned to earth, it would be a price well worth paying.” “The Christmas Tree” showcases an equally lean storytelling style; the tale needs just over a dozen pages to deliver a comeuppance to a snobbish man who seeks to shield his daughters from those he deems their social inferiors. (“He made me think of the leathery ‘cattle barons’ I used to see in the old-time Western movies,” notes the narrator.) An equally unexpected twist distinguishes “The Undefeated Rough and Tumble Champion of Kansas,” whose brawling bar owner, Cowboy Swensen, faces a situation that a crowd—and the narrator, a former U.S. Army ironworker—never see coming. But the real jewels are the aforementioned “Reunion” and “Mr. Birnbaum,” the latter of which focuses on the periodic postwar encounters of a teenage narrator and a door-to-door insurance collector, who end up united in mutual tragedy. (“As the song says, ‘Your life is what happens to you.’”) In “Reunion,” Michael vows to forget his commander until he learns that he’s now a general, causing his rage to smolder anew and force a confrontation that he’d been dreading. (“Now Hardee had surfaced, and Michael felt himself again in danger of being shot down.”) It’s the type of intimately but tautly crafted moment that suggests that the author might have created more fine works, had he decided to pursue them. As is, readers will be grateful for and fully engaged with the results of his brief writing journey.
An expressive set of works that offer one man’s insights into wartime service.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798994295519
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2026
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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