A captivating novel, intellectually stimulating and literarily engrossing.
In Hayes’ novel, a dying mother reveals to her daughter her family’s long history of trauma in the hope she can break free of it.
Dying in hospice care, Savannah Schaeffer, a 72-year-old retired professor of psychology, decides she has no choice but to reveal to her daughter Chloe the grim history of “intergenerational trauma” in her family. Chloe is a successful physician but has an inclination toward romantic failure; she is poised to marry Dwayne, another psychologist, a decision Savannah believes is a dire mistake. To emancipate Chloe from the legacy of pain that lives deep in the family’s marrow, Savannah (whose mother died by suicide when Savannah was only 15 years old) believes that her daughter needs to be exposed to the details of its “toxic brew,” an achingly heroic charge movingly described by the author. To that end, Savannah gives to Chloe two journals—one written by her grandmother Hildegard and another by her father Johan, both of which chronicle nearly incomprehensible emotional challenges. Hildegard’s life was filled with pain and danger—she suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a mercurially violent husband named Markus and was afflicted with terrible depression and mental illness. Johan weathered the abuse of Markus as well, and finally killed him, as well as his own brother, and he experienced the unspeakable ravages of World War II. Chloe is mesmerized by the successive revelations about her lineage, as well as by her mother’s newly discovered open-handedness, a great departure for a woman for whom “leaving things unsaid is in her DNA.” Chloe must contend with the truth about her family, and also consider the kind of life she wants to lead (and whether Dwayne will be a part of it). She is further conflicted about Savannah’s decision to “hasten her death” and her own participation in that process as a palliative care doctor.
Hayes’ sprawling saga, composed of the main narrative and excerpts from the two journals, is delicately complex and emotionally affecting. Chloe is compelled to confront the possibility that all of this cumulative trauma somehow lives within her and affects the decisions that shape her life. “Their lives are mine now as if I had lived them. They live inside me, shaping who I am and my choices. A genetic echo. They always have been, but I now consciously know they always have been.” However, that acknowledgment doesn’t means she must accept the life Savannah envisions for her—Chloe must not only come to terms with a past she never experienced and shoulder it like painful freight but also forge ahead and create her own path. A novel so steeped in psychological ideas is threatened by two pitfalls—the tendency to become academically arid or to lecture the reader while relying upon banal platitudes. Impressively, Hayes manages to avoid both of these—this is a genuinely engrossing story, wise but never sententious. Moreover, it is an inspiring one—the past can never be escaped, but that does not mean it must serve as a destiny.
A captivating novel, intellectually stimulating and literarily engrossing.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798991105200
Page Count: 418
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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