An ambitious novel written in sometimes overly ambitious prose, this book charms, intrigues, and bewilders.
A century-spanning murder mystery that focuses more on the identities of the victims than the killers.
Iridia is a forensic sculptor in Brooklyn working for the Missing Persons bureau. Her job is to reconstruct the faces of unidentified skeletal remains in order to help identify them. The functionally orphaned child of two imprisoned, weed-growing anarchists, Iridia is used to a life of isolation, but when a seemingly innocuous cold case lands in her lap, she's drawn into a conspiracy involving arson, murder, exotic animal smuggling, and, eventually, threats on her life. In a bid to disappear as permanently as the still anonymous owners of the skulls in her studio, Iridia winds up in Vienna, where she attempts to lie low even as she's drawn back into the web of her old profession. Meanwhile, Martin Shusterman just keeps showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Originally from suburban New York, he forges a somewhat aimless cello career that eventually takes him to Buenos Aires, where he lives with his girlfriend, Abril, until she is disappeared, an incidental casualty in Argentina’s Dirty War. Shusterman returns to New York but remains obsessed with his former Buenos Aires neighbor Karl Sauer, a former Nazi propagandist filmmaker in hiding. Shusterman’s search for Sauer brings him to Vienna, where Sauer made his films in the 1930s and '40s. Using information from the septuagenarian daughter of one of Sauer’s leading men, Shusterman is led to the ruins of 39 Nachtfalterallee, the site of Sauer’s former offices, where a much older mystery is being unearthed. On the same site, Unna was the proprietress of a brothel in the last decades of the 1600s. Hardworking and pragmatic, she managed to survive the Ottoman siege and an outbreak of the plague while running a successful house of ill-repute. As the city suffers under the ravages of disease, poverty, and the pressing needs of refugees driven in front of the Ottoman army, Unna’s position becomes ever more tenuous. Iridia’s, Shusterman’s, and Unna’s stories—along with those of a myriad of other characters representative of the sideshows, genocides, and passing obsessions of the last five centuries or so—wind together along the slenderest spindles of happenstance, implausibly but definitively connecting through the ephemera of the objects (and skulls) they leave behind. By the final pages, the reader is simultaneously exhausted by the rigors of exposition-heavy prose and invigorated by the intellectual ambition of the author’s takes on death, time, history, and everything in between.
An ambitious novel written in sometimes overly ambitious prose, this book charms, intrigues, and bewilders.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950539-33-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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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