A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.
In Bornstein’s debut novel, an American Jew’s story unfolds simultaneously across two timelines.
Born in Paris to Jews from Poland and Morocco and raised in both Israel and Brooklyn, the polyglot Bram Goodman represents the whole of the Diaspora. In 1983, Bram, recently discharged from the Israeli Defense Force and fresh from a summer in Côte d’Azur teaching wealthy children to swim, has just returned to his semi-hometown of New York City. He’s followed a girl there: Liz Ellis, an idealistic Columbia Law grad (and gentile) from Arizona who’s just taken a job at a legal nonprofit. Falling in love with Liz helps distract Bram from the fact that he hasn’t yet grappled with the death of his Israeli cousin, Yoni, who died by suicide following their service in the Lebanon War. In 2015, 32 years later, a middle-aged Bram occupies an entirely different position in life. He and Liz are living in Queens with three kids and a pair of ornery upstairs tenants. Bram serves as the executive director of The Linden Hills Community House, located in a mostly Black neighborhood of south Brooklyn. His progressive 17-year-old daughter, Jenna, is critical of all things Israel, while his youngest, Theo, is preparing to undergo his bar mitzvah. The specter of a Trump presidency hangs in the air, as does the ghost of Yoni, whose death—and what it means—Bram still hasn’t fully worked out. Tied up in Bram’s grief is a never-realized dream Yoni had for the two of them to swim the English Channel (“A two-way, back and forth,” he explains. “We’d be the first Israeli cousins to do so”). The novel alternates between the two timelines, which mirror and inform each other in unexpected ways, moving Bram (and the reader) inevitably back to Israel.
The author has an observant eye, summoning both eras of New York in brilliant detail and persuasively depicting the same characters at very different times of life. The dialogue is particularly sharp and laden with dark humor, as when Bram dismisses Theo’s worry that any Jews in New York would vote for Donald Trump: “ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum told me his father thinks Trump would be good for Israel.’ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum’s father would probably go to Dr. Mengele for a second opinion.’ ” At one point Bram praises Philip Roth, and Bram’s preoccupations—how to be both an Israeli Jew and a secular American progressive with a shiksa wife—feel very much of the generation raised on Roth’s novels. It’s possible that younger readers will not find these concerns quite so compelling. There are some pacing issues as well: The book is long at 470 pages, and its plot accumulates more than unfurls. Even so, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, the novel is a pleasure to read. At all times, the writing displays a keen wit and a deep sense of history. It’s a great novel of New York in the Trump era and a tender look at the way the progression of time makes immigrants of us all.
A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 979-8886790382
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
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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