Fresh, funny, intelligent, and deeply satisfying.
Myers’ lively comic novel focuses on the raw passions of four women, not for men or each other—well, maybe those too—but mostly for the physical experience of archaeology, the grueling grunt work of a hot summer dig.
The dig in question takes place in Greece under the auspices of autocratic Dr. Charles Barton, from an unnamed university. Zara, Kara, Elise, and Patty arrive with different skills and expectations. Patty, a clueless undergraduate intern who knows nothing about archaeology, has become Barton’s spy and general whipping girl. Zara had a wonderful experience in Greece as an undergrad on the dig six years ago until she broke up with her grad student boyfriend, Gary, now a committed archaeologist. She’s drifted through various botched jobs and boyfriends ever since. Aware that Gary will be there, she joins this year’s dig on a desperate whim. But Gary is engaged to ambitious, high-strung perfectionist Kara, who was also on Zara’s first dig and now runs the site lab; she’s worried that her goal of a job at Sotheby’s could be derailed if she doesn’t find two missing discuses for which she’s responsible. Eccentric, independent 44-year-old Elise lacks academic credentials but is highly respected as an adept professional excavator. She and Kara blame each other for a loss suffered several years earlier, a small but valuable statue Elise found and Kara restored before it was supposedly destroyed by an earthquake. Is there a connection between the discuses and the statue? Maybe. Myers gives the angst-ridden, imperfect women entertainingly distinct voices and personalities. The men are fun too, both the appealing ones and the creeps. (And then there’s the voice of the buried.) Desires collide and relationships realign rapidly as the dig begins to go awry. Myers is adept at academic satire with a feminist bent and at unsentimental romance, but she really shines at bringing to life a working excavation: the smells, the grime, the exhaustion. And the exhilaration.
Fresh, funny, intelligent, and deeply satisfying.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304512
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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