A disturbing, occasionally overwrought period piece with moments of grace and a sturdy hero.
A resilient young girl faces extreme poverty and violence during the 1930s and 1940s in Field’s historical novel.
The story begins in December of 1927 with a devastating automobile accident. Nineteen-year-old Margarete Bowerman Owens is en route to the Seattle train depot, fleeing her abusive husband and attempting to bring her 3-month-old daughter to her own mother’s farm in eastern Oregon. But Margarete’s car is brutally pushed off the road, and only baby Eleanor survives. Five years later, the musically inclined Eleanor is being raised by her maternal grandmother, Delores Bowerman. Although Delores, whose husband abandoned her, was already caring for her own five children at the time of the accident, she took her infant granddaughter when Eleanor’s father said he couldn’t care for her. It is a hardscrabble life, and little Eleanor feels bereft of a parent’s love. Still, in 1935, when the father she has not seen for seven years sues to regain custody of her, she elects to remain with her grandmother, despite his bribes of fine clothes and toys. This was a wise choice; several years later, when she travels to Seattle to help care for her aunt’s young children, her father sexually assaults her. Further trauma awaits her: The following years are filled with hopes, disappointments, and an impulsive, abusive marriage that she regrets immediately. The author effectively portrays the difficulties and desperation of poverty-level farm life through the years of the Great Depression: “Bread, milk from their Jersey cow Babe, last summer’s canned spinach, and a few eggs were all the family had for their dinners.” But there is also a throughline acknowledging the strength Eleanor gains from family ties and her young uncles’ loving support. Although the storyline frequently lapses into melodrama, complete with bad guys who are exceptionally evil, the evocative prose and several scenes of intense action make the narrative addictive. Vividly graphic scenes of violence animate the second half of the novel, culminating in a thrillingly explosive life-and-death battle.
A disturbing, occasionally overwrought period piece with moments of grace and a sturdy hero.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8988291107
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forsythia Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 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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