An entertaining meta-philosophical romp in which great minds mull over life’s deepest questions.
Navarro offers a fantasy in which famed philosopher Kurt Gödel seeks answers in the afterlife.
The narrative focuses on the “brilliant, eccentric, unsettlingly precise” Gödel, a figure whom the author, in an introduction, compares to Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin and describes as not only a mathematician, but also a “philosopher of mystery” who found new puzzles in settled certainties. “In any system that’s powerful enough to talk about arithmetic,” Navarro writes, “there will always be true statements that the system can never prove.” As a way to pursue these questions further, the author imagines Gödel journeying to a series of afterworld locations to have conversations with a wide variety of famous artists and thinkers from the past. Gödel talks with fellow philosophers, of course, but he also chats with such figures as painter Jackson Pollock (“‘Logic and paint,’ Pollock mused, ‘both dance around the unknown’”) and even Jesus, whom he asks about the incompleteness at the heart of mathematics: “If I left no room for doubt, then there would be no true faith,” Jesus tells him. “Faith must be chosen.” In each encounter, Gödel doggedly inquires about the nature of belief and certainty and looks into the possibility of quantifying morality and doubt. It’s a familiar but inspired storytelling device, and Navarro uses it skillfully, delicately navigating the dramatics of presenting each conversation and his indefatigable main character’s overarching philosophical quest. Socrates, for instance, asks the protagonist whether one can ever fully grasp truth, and readers are told that Gödel “had always admired [mathematician Blaise] Pascal’s mind, not only for his rigorous approach to mathematical truth but for his willingness to engage with the ineffable.” Philosophical discussion dominates the narrative; as a result, some historical figures end up sounding more alike than they likely would have in real life. This slight shortcoming is a result of the book’s pedagogical nature, but it never entirely blunts the fun.
An entertaining meta-philosophical romp in which great minds mull over life’s deepest questions.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798891389588
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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 flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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