Hypnotizing and inscrutable.
In this hallucinatory, impressionistic novel by a 23-year-old Australian writer, a girl’s involvement with an artist opens up a world preoccupied by money and drugs.
Fifteen-year-old Monk lives in a dingy Chinatown apartment with her dad, a lapsed art professor who, after Monk’s mother left him, spends most of his time on their brown couch watching nature documentaries and nursing a dependency on alcohol and anxiety medication: “Xanax as a white hunk. Dad takes his with Earl Grey tea. Little yellow sappy sags for eyes.” Monk meets a high school senior named Santa Coy and quickly becomes obsessed with him, but once she starts inviting him to her apartment, Santa Coy begins making “Basquiat-lite” art in the kitchen for her father. The two men host exhibitions of Santa Coy’s work in the apartment, attend art shows, and start having muttered discussions about paint and profit. Monk begins to feel left out, though it’s unclear whether she wants Santa Coy’s or her father’s attention all to herself, to make art herself, to have art made of her—or all of the above. Santa Coy and Monk’s father suddenly come into a lot of money, and Monk’s father is just as suddenly attacked and ends up in the hospital. Perhaps, Monk thinks, it’s because she asked her friend’s mother, a “healer” named Honey, to help her with her situation, which only draws her further into an underworld suffused with scammers and violence. The novel is told in a series of titled, hyperassociative, impressively strange vignettes. The entirety of “This Generation Asks for Signs,” for instance: “Do you think in Heaven everybody will be the same amount of appealing, and never stop? In the mirror my body’s becoming a tree.” Lau narrates the drug-laced high school parties and booze-drenched art world parties Monk moves through with the same ambiently threatening mood—selling “fake art” and selling “fake drugs,” it’s clear, are much the same thing. The prose is laden with significance, repeated references to jazz and cowboys and panthers and deserts that can get so dense it’s unclear, in the end, what it’s all supposed to mean.
Hypnotizing and inscrutable.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56689-594-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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