A safe, cozy adventure built on the solid foundations of everyday life and uncommon imagination.
Two teenagers’ friendship becomes tested while they hone their abilities in this third installment of a paranormal fantasy series.
Fourteen-year-olds Sadie Callahan and Jason Lex have special powers. Sadie is a Yowie (the Australian cousin of America’s Bigfoot) and can shift between human and animal form. Her Yowie heritage also enables her to heal quickly and turn invisible, although she’s yet to master this. Jason is a Rampart Guard, a fire-wielding warden of the barrier that keeps cryptids (Yowies, Yetis, etc.) hidden in the human world. Both Sadie and Jason are in training; whereas he embraces the changes he’s going through, she is less keen. Sadie has been chosen to lead the Yowies, but until she’s ready to face the current leader—the nefarious Garrison Devine—she remains in hiding and can pretend to live a normal life. This head-in-the-sand approach comes unstuck when a stray Bigfoot is seen around town. Sadie and Jason track it down, but when the Bigfoot turns out to be a Yowie—the same one that killed Sadie’s grandma—and Jason refuses to kill it, their bond of friendship is threatened. Will Sadie ever forgive him? And how will she cope when her mother, who everyone thought was killed when Sadie was a baby, comes back into her life? Barnhart (The Clan Calling, 2017, etc.) writes in the third person, mixing narrative descriptions and dialogue to good effect. The teens and adults all have their quirks, but readers new to the series may struggle to keep track of the relationships. There are many characters, and they’re all a bit similar (in the sense that they remain good-natured and talk through their issues even when there’s friction). The plot, likewise, is very much a continuation of previous volumes. The complicated backstory goes largely unexplained, and the progression of the big picture is minimal. But while the current installment feels almost as if it’s treading water, its true beauty lies in the protagonists’ growth and the way they deal with ordinary teen issues (of which there are many). Rather than dazzle readers with big developments, the author anchors the paranormal elements and invites teens and adults alike to feel part of Sadie and Jason’s extended family.
A safe, cozy adventure built on the solid foundations of everyday life and uncommon imagination.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9983369-4-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Camashea Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
PERSPECTIVES
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