Agreeable enough, but best for completist library collections and diehard fans.
Miscellaneous writings from shortly before and after To Kill a Mockingbird made the author famous.
Taken as a whole, the works add up to pleasant ephemera. The eight previously unpublished short stories mostly plumb the same material as Lee’s bestselling novel: small-town life in Alabama, often viewed through the eyes of a child. In “The Water Tank,” a sixth grader is terrified that she might be pregnant based on misleading information from her much older, half-educated classmates. “The Binoculars,” “The Cat’s Meow,” and the title story also address with rueful humor Southern ignorance and narrow-mindedness, though the calm, reasonable father in “The Pinking Shears” foreshadows the counterbalance presented by Atticus Finch in Mockingbird. “This Is Show Business?,” a funny account of a favor turned into a day-long ordeal, and “A Roomful of Kibble,” about an eccentric acquaintance, are the only tales set in New York, where Lee lived for many years; “The Viewers and the Viewed,” a wry analysis of Manhattan movie audiences’ reactions to bogus film titles, is misleadingly grouped under fiction. The essays published in the decade following her novel’s success are standard-issue magazine fare: a rambling consideration of “Love—in Other Words”; a recipe for crackling bread with the sardonic aside, “Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy”; patriotic musings on “When Children Discover America.” The exceptions are a moving piece about the Christmas gift that gave Lee the freedom to write without financial constraints for an entire year and a touching but sharp-eyed tribute to her close friend Truman Capote. A 1983 lecture nostalgically recalls Albert James Pickett’s 19th-century History of Alabama; a 1989 essay written for an American Film Institute program praises Gregory Peck’s “inspired performance” as Atticus; and a 2006 letter to Oprah asks, “Can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer?”
Agreeable enough, but best for completist library collections and diehard fans.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063460515
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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