Family problems are not exactly solved but are entertainingly re-engineered in an appealing escapist read.
Invasive snails, stolen drugs, a gay husband, romance, and long-held secrets color the Pickford family’s return to their old holiday island in Lake Michigan for one last get-together.
Effgen’s likable novel ticks several of the boxes for a summer read—waterside resort location, diverse assembly of personalities, not-too-ponderous discussion of midlife issues, and a wry comic touch. His subject is a family’s psychologies and dynamics as the three adult siblings, their father, and one teenage daughter gather at the Grand Hotel in tribute to their recently deceased mother. Viv is coming to terms with her husband’s revelation of his homosexuality, a fact that her daughter, Ash, has long known. Pete, a dorky child grown into a respected expert on gastropods, remains “polite and thoughtful and childless.” And ne’er-do-well Corey, smooth-tongued but penniless, is quietly trying to find a buyer for the block of cocaine he happens to have just stolen. The island holds memories for all the adults and is a background for who they have become. Pete indulged his passion for biology here, Viv lost her virginity in a rowboat one July Fourth, and Corey, at 12, found opportunities to develop his morally dubious career. In addition, there’s the lingering question of why their summer cottage was sold so suddenly, the arrival of a creepy man in pursuit of Corey’s drugs, and the attractive woman and child Pete encounters living in the new house built on the site of the Pickfords’ old cottage. Effgen stirs this busy pot with a capable hand. His characters are persuasive and his plot strands, even if they range between predictable and inappropriately violent, are deftly woven. Compared to, say, Catherine Newman’s Sandwich (2024), this novel offers less crackling wit but greater narrative breadth. And the author lands the story successfully, in a positive place for most concerned.
Family problems are not exactly solved but are entertainingly re-engineered in an appealing escapist read.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798217208128
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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