Family drama that runs deep and makes for some compulsively readable fiction.
Duning transports readers to small-town Tennessee in this Southern family saga.
The book’s novelistic terrain will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town in the Southern U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Readers first meet Liam, the youngest of the four Menschen kids. Their mother, Vivian, was a Marlowe, a firmly rooted family whose members were considered local gentry. They all live at the family plantation home, Vale Hollow, in Lawton, Tennessee. Dad is Franklin Menschen, and he writes the annual Christmas letter—always showing the family in a positive light—which in some ways is the foil to Liam’s account of events. (With wicked innuendo, Liam makes the point that if you’re a well-mannered white boy in this town, the cops will cut you some slack, no matter how many laws you break.) The novel’s pages are suffused with the usual melodrama of growing up and figuring life out. The book has plenty of tragedies as well: classmates killed in car crashes or in stupid pranks gone wrong. But for the most part, these are basically good kids; they succeed, go to college, marry, and find decent jobs. In the last chapters, Liam is happily married and an expecting grandfather, while Vivian and Franklin have passed away after lives well lived. For these fictional small-town folks, high school and college friends die in middle age, reunions get thinner and thinner, and memories eventually dim. This is an easy book to like. The Christmas letter as foil is a bit exaggeratedly sugarcoated, but it’s not as if Liam and his friends try to counter the letters’ idealized familial portraits; their youthful sins are venial, not mortal. The letters themselves, thank goodness, are not full of the obnoxious bragging that invites parody. One also wonders why Duning decided to cast the book as fiction when it’s so obviously his own life story, including what must be Duning family photographs; presumably, he wanted the cachet of good ole boy storytelling and perhaps license to stretch things once in a while. But Duning is a compelling, colorful prose stylist—so wherever he goes, readers will surely be happy to follow.
Family drama that runs deep and makes for some compulsively readable fiction.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798901742877
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2026
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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