A historically evocative period piece with a strong, inspiring hero who will resonate with a wide swath of readers.
A young woman sets out to find her infant daughter in 17th-century Boston.
From the outset, Lewis’ novel immerses readers in a pathologically moralistic Puritan society. After being brutally raped, the female protagonist, Rachel, attracts opprobrium and censure from the locals. She is forced—like Hester Prynne with her A—to wear a Won her breast, for Whore. Meanwhile the smirking lout who raped her, Henry Watkins, is simply sent back to his family in Salem, a clue as to how women were treated in this misogynistic time and place. But Rachel does have powerful help in the person of Anne Hutchinson, who takes her in. The Hutchinsons are fabulously wealthy, and Anne is the archenemy of power-obsessed Governor John Winthrop, who gets wind of the Bible sessions she leads in order to further her radical interpretation of Holy Writ. Rachel, though living with the Hutchinsons, is also a servant in the Winthrop household, and her master encourages her to report on her benefactress’ teachings. For devious reasons, Winthrop gins up a war against the Pequot tribe to the west, where Rachel has reason to believe she can find her daughter, who was taken away by her drunken father. So, she disguises herself as a teenage boy and volunteers. The Pequot War (1636–38) is a disgraceful and bloody expedition, but the Puritans win. Does Rachel find her infant daughter? Well, that’s spoiler territory, but let’s just say that the book’s ending is bittersweet.
Lewis has a raft of publications, fiction and nonfiction, under his belt, and the writing more than shows that. And Rachel, who is also the narrator, is a wonderful creation, smart and spunky and intuitive. As she sizes up of one of her inquisitors, “He tries to soften his voice to tell he is on my side, but the effect is hideous, as though he was a filthy toad trying to talk like a man.” She sees through the hypocrisy and venality of the powers that be (the Pequot War was widely considered a land grab). Anne Hutchinson was a real historical character, hated and feared by the establishment because she believed in the Covenant of Grace, as opposed to Winthrop and his crew, who backed the Covenant of Works. Winthrop managed to get Hutchinson, his nemesis, expelled from the colony. She resettled in Roger Williams’ Providence Plantations, a place of sanctuary in the New England sea of madness. Lewis, a retired academic who has a doctorate in the literature of that period, truly makes 17th-century New England come alive. He includes an anecdote about a woman who tries to kill her infant, and although this act will strike readers as horrendous and unconscionable, at least this poor woman’s tormented anxiety about her fate in the afterlife has been settled: She knows for certain that she’s damned. Rachel is part of this world, but she seems a harbinger of a newer, more humane society, and that is the saving—not the predestined—grace.
A historically evocative period piece with a strong, inspiring hero who will resonate with a wide swath of readers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781685624804
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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