An engaging if somewhat flat teenage narrative of an apparent abduction and a dissolving friendship.
A novel of youth and not-quite-innocence set in 1980s California, where teenage loyalties are tested by the disappearance of one girl and the growing suspicion, on the part of her best friend, that an elaborate deception may have been perpetrated.
Thirteen-year-old Eulabee, “a very good student with a sinister side,” and her best friend, Maria Fabiola, a precocious beauty, are as lucky as any California girls can be. Living in the wealthy enclave of Sea Cliff with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge (though Eulabee’s family is not rich), they attend the exclusive Spragg School for Girls and are renowned for their daring ability to scale the local cliffs and to read the treacherous ocean tides. They also know “where the boys live” in their neighborhood, though the danger at the heart of the novel resides elsewhere. “Separately we are good girls,” Eulabee explains, “together...we are trouble.” Innocent trouble, that is, of the teenage variety involving drugs (negligible), alcohol (purveyed by bad boys), and lying to parents and teachers. The first shadow to fall on this breezy narrative is that of a parked car noticed by the girls one morning on their way to school. The driver asks them the time, they answer and walk on, but Maria Fabiola insists, “He was touching himself…and he said he’s going to find us later!” Eulabee, who says she didn’t see this happen, is branded a traitor at school (and later a “slut” for being mauled at a party). Then Maria Fabiola goes missing. Two more apparent disappearances follow, one all too real. The narrative darkens, and Eulabee’s impulse to uncover the truth behind the initial event both increases her isolation and, ironically, intensifies the tabloid drama. “The newspapers called what happened the Sea Cliff Seizures, and the name stuck,” she reflects decades later when a chance meeting in 2019 sheds new light on the distant affair. That final chapter, in its compressed elegance and psychological subtlety, also hints at the novel that might have been.
An engaging if somewhat flat teenage narrative of an apparent abduction and a dissolving friendship.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-293623-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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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