A novel about the families we inherit and the ones we make for ourselves.
A sprawling, multigenerational portrait of a mixed-race family that begins with a man's quest to uncover the truth of his origins.
Jenry Castillo, a talented pianist raised by Marisa, a single mother from a family of Cuban immigrants, sets off from Miami to begin his first semester at Brown University. He's desperate to find out more about his biological father, Jasper Patterson, a famous Black ballet dancer his mother met when she studied there and who died young in a tragic accident. Soon after arriving in Providence, he meets Jasper’s relatives—his own biological grandfather, Winston, and aunt, Juliet—and the real story of his heritage proves to be more complicated than he'd imagined. With a dizzying narrative that zips from character to character and weaves between present and past, from Providence to Miami to New York to Cuba, Harper has created a novel about longing, loss, kinship, talent, queerness, and what makes a family. At its heart is the story of two young women, Marisa and Juliet, who love each other and decide to have a baby together—and all the lies and secrets and betrayals that unfurl from that choice. Juliet, the "other mother," is a complicated, fully imagined character whose warmth and charm make you root for her even as her darker angels—addiction, selfishness, a desperate need for artistic success—threaten the new life she’s built since losing contact with Jenry. The descriptive language is sharpest in these sections: Juliet, once a talented jazz pianist, describes the way windshield wipers give her a feeling of comfort, “like the metronome always used to, marking the top of her piano like an emblem marks the hood of a car.” The raw intensity of Juliet’s feelings for Jenry, the fear and desire his arrival brings into her life, and her desperation not to make the same mistakes again offer real stakes and drive the narrative forward pleasurably. Some of the sections feel less necessary. The story of Jasper is lovely but ultimately distracting from the main arc. Even Jenry’s section, the theoretical raison d'être of the novel, is sluggish and overdetermined. Twists and turns introduced in the historical sections complicate the facts of Jenry’s birth and move the plot forward without illuminating the deeper, more interesting conflicts between characters in the present—or creating space for unexpected revelations in the future.
A novel about the families we inherit and the ones we make for ourselves.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-504-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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