An uneven portrait of a marriage that relives the early days of the Covid pandemic without offering fresh insight.
A struggling couple flees New York with their two daughters in the spring of 2020.
Pete and Alice leave New York for their vacation home in Maine at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pete is in finance, while Alice is a playwright whose creative work—much to her chagrin—has become eclipsed by her role as stay-at-home mom. They abscond to their summer home both to escape the chaos and death that surround them in the city and to get some distance from “the Her,” a thinly sketched woman with whom Pete has been having a yearslong affair. What Pete and Alice fail to consider is the disdain with which they will be received by the terrified Maine locals, who, protective of their community, threaten and harass the New Yorkers. The summer home that has been a respite in years past transforms into something bleak, unwelcoming, and foreign. The novel tracks nearly a year with chapters told from various perspectives—Alice narrates most of the book, while occasional third-person chapters focus on Pete and tween daughters Iris and Sophie. Much of the book is concerned with the minutiae of pandemic life—for example, Pete’s search for reliable Wi-Fi and Alice’s rationing of toilet paper and food. Sprinkled throughout are flashbacks to earlier periods in Pete and Alice’s relationship that illuminate how the two met and fell in love as well as how their marriage began to strain under the weight of children, Alice’s frustrated creative ambitions, and Pete’s extramarital affair. In Maine, the two struggle to reconcile in the wake of Pete’s betrayal while also attempting to imagine a way forward as a family—whether in Maine or New York. Readers may struggle to connect with Alice, who lacks agency and seems more invested in the ennui of her upper-class existence than in the world around her or her supposed creative goals. Clichés abound, from buttoned-up WASPs to characters spontaneously throwing up when emotional.
An uneven portrait of a marriage that relives the early days of the Covid pandemic without offering fresh insight.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780063242661
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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