A strange and winning historical romp about a family plagued by doubts and gas.
Potter presents a fictional biography chronicling a family’s journey through the key events of the 20th century.
In his debut work of fiction, the author presents the story of Dr. Ernst Grimm Lohr (known to all simply as Grimm Lohr), a physician born in Turin, Italy, in 1889 (“in the age of genteel senility, nascent science, colonization and empire-making”), as told by his grandson, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr. Elias notes the ways in which his grandfather’s life touched on and sometimes epitomized “the leitmotifs of Western civilization—evangelical expansionism, a striving for the infinite, the spirit of economics encoded in the language of the bourgeoisie.” Grimm Lohr specializes in the human digestive system and its gases, which brings him to the attention of GeneralLudendorff and the German war machine during the First World War. He conducts experiments (including one in which 100 nuns are given a diet of uncultured buttermilk, uncooked reptiles, and raw cabbage), and after the war he becomes a successful author of books about his specialty, including The Gases of the Masses and Melodies of the Large Intestine. He fathers Elias’ dad, Irving, and Potter’s narrative follows this young man as he rebels (“I shall not arrange the affairs of my life around the bowel habits of other men, Father!”) and joins the Hitler Youth. The narrative moves on to focus on Elias’ own story, including his long sojourn in Hollywood working on such epic series as Heaven, Hell, Pus. Potter chronicles all of this with a remarkably dry, deadpan sense of humor that manages to remain understated while the author repeatedly makes flatulence-related jokes (poor, hapless Elias spends time late in the book at a getaway called Spirit Wind). The book’s very generous length betrays no trace of self-indulgence; the author layers every chapter with a delightful combination of historical and literary context (one character is described as “the kind of man Chaucer would have called a ‘stout carl’”) and Pynchonesque absurdities.
A strange and winning historical romp about a family plagued by doubts and gas.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781665773270
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Archway
Review Posted Online: April 2, 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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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