A raucously entertaining, richly atmospheric SF–tinged sports fable.
Baseball players travel back in time to the wild major leagues of the early 20th century in this fantasy.
Hermanos’ tale follows three modern-day San Francisco Giants teammates—prima-donna star André Velez, who keeps hammering homers with the help of illicit steroids; struggling rookie second baseman Johnny Blent; and grizzled manager Bucky Martin. They get catapulted back to the year 1906 during an earthquake and wash up with the New York Giants. The trio takes in a barely recognizable sport where bats weigh 50 ounces; unkempt playing fields are studded with rocks and potholes; spitballs are legal; drunken fans routinely attack players on the diamond; and contracts pay $800 a year. Blent and Velez painfully adjust—the half Black Velez pretends to be a Native American to get into the segregated majors—to become top players. Martin, meanwhile, gets hired as manager thanks to his 21st-century sabermetrics; he gradually tames a team that likes liquor, vandalism, and gunplay better than practicing and leads the Giants from the cellar to the World Series. Unfortunately, the trio’s new timeline is warped by the presence of New Glory, a Caribbean slave empire run by Confederates who escaped to Cuba after the Civil War and are forcing Albert Einstein to build them an atom bomb. When New Glory’s baseball league challenges the Giants to a “Solar Series,” the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Hermanos’ novel mixes steampunk themes into a vivid baseball yarn that’s full of colorful period details and piquant sketches of historical figures, from wily mound genius Christy Mathewson to a blustery Theodore Roosevelt and a mad Nikola Tesla. The author’s portrait of old-time baseball steeps readers in intricate strategizing, punchy dialogue—“Phillippe, you fucking infant! Suck your thumb! Shake your rattle!” goes a typical on-field razzing—and play-by-play that’s riveting and even lyrical. (“Head down, legs churning, he senses the white light of God is emanating from second base as he races for it, the ball crossing his field of vision as he slides, the ball ticking off the second baseman’s glove, Blent popping up and zipping for third, McGraw’s fist of a face staring at the ball coming in, ‘Down! Down! Down!’ ”) Readers will stick with this riotous page-turner to the last out.
A raucously entertaining, richly atmospheric SF–tinged sports fable.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950301-23-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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