Confrontational and often abstract, but grounded in real human emotion and experience.
A provocative French writer and filmmaker explores #MeToo, the fate of aging actresses, and addiction.
“Dude, screw your apologies, screw your monologue, screw everything: there’s nothing about you that interests me.” This is the opening line of Rebecca Latté’s email response to Oscar Jayack, a novelist who’s trying to apologize for a (since deleted) post in which he excoriated her for no longer being the same person—the same body—that boys like him once fantasized about. Despite her claim that Oscar is boring, Rebecca continues to reply to his emails, and the two develop a relationship that is vital to both of them and shaped not just by their shared working-class childhood, but also by the fact that Oscar’s older sister was Rebecca’s best friend back in the 1980s. There is a third party in this story: Zoé Katana, a feminist blogger who has publicly accused Oscar of sexually harassing her while she was assigned by his publisher to work as his publicist. This is an epistolary novel shaped by contemporary modes of communication, but it’s still an epistolary novel, which is not a forgiving form—or even a believable form, much of the time. Opinions about whether or not Despentes pulls this off depend largely on how much the reader enjoys listening to three hyperverbal, theory-inclined people talk to and at and over each other. That said, Despentes gives readers plenty of reason to stick around, beginning with Rebecca’s refusal to put up with Oscar’s shit. His response to being canceled after he’s outed as a sex pest is predictably self-serving, and his new confidante will have none of it. At the same time, Rebecca comes to see Oscar as a role model in sobriety. Meanwhile, she serendipitously connects with Zoé while Paris is locked down because of Covid-19, which complicates her relationship with Oscar. What makes this novel work as a novel—rather than a collection of rants presented as a novel—is that Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé come across as real people and their interactions with each other manifestly change them.
Confrontational and often abstract, but grounded in real human emotion and experience.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780374611613
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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