Real and raw and exquisitely well crafted.
A knockout of a second novel from the author of Oola (2017).
Ruth is 27 and adrift when we meet her. She has a master’s degree she doesn’t know what to do with. She’s living in the Mission with her ex-boyfriend, Dino, a ketamine dealer who enjoys wearing women’s lingerie. And she’s dancing at a club where she has assumed the name Baby—not because she has any sort of fully fleshed-out stage persona but, rather, because that’s a thing men call her. Narrating her life in a way that feels aimless but not quite random, she tells the story of how she has arrived at this place. She remembers learning about sex from her more worldly friend Mazzy, a young woman “forever marked by being the first student at her private all-girls school to need a real bra.” Ruth reminisces about past lovers and the substances that shaped their relationships. And she describes the men she meets at work, delineating their needs and appetites with an anthropological detachment that is not without empathy. Dino remains, though, the emotional center of her universe, and when he goes missing, she unravels. Newell writes about sex work and drugs and what people—some people—used to call the demimonde without moralizing or reducing her characters to grim allegories. This book is, among other things, funny and sometimes very sweet, and Newell gives shape to Ruth’s chaotic life with gorgeously precise prose. When she sees the ballet-dancer daughter of a wealthy man with whom she’s having an affair, Ruth thinks, “She was the luckiest girl in the whole wide world and she didn’t even care. She wore her hair up in a bun, her neck cool and pale as a halved pear.” There’s so much longing packed into that handful of words! “The hours swooped and gooped around us like fallen ice-cream cones.” Out of context, this does not seem like a great sentence. But within a swirling mess of metaphors recounting doing ketamine with Dino and falling in love, it approaches the sublime.
Real and raw and exquisitely well crafted.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780374613891
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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