A masterfully controlled tear-jerker of a novel about found family.
In Miller’s debut literary novel, a runaway unexpectedly comes to rely on an elderly woman.
The unnamed boy who narrates the novel first encounters Ruth while he’s smashing sunflower seeds with a rock outside her apartment. Ruth is a patient, joke-loving elderly woman who lives in a retirement community. The narrator is a grumpy, unhoused 8-year-old who hates approximately “573” things, including lollipops, home renovation shows, and anything that doesn’t make sense or wastes time. After Ruth slowly gains the boy’s trust by offering him cookies over a few days, the two build up a dialogue over games of hearts and televised baseball (the boy is a devoted collector of baseball cards). When it becomes clear that the boy has nowhere else to go, Ruth invites him to stay on her couch. She has a few ground rules related to the bathroom and the remote control, but Ruth seems especially set on one rule: “Under this roof,” she tells the boy, “there’s no talking about the past. No asking me how I got here. No asking what happened to me the day before we met, or the week before, or a year ago, or 10 years ago, or 70 years ago. That goes for both of us, including you.” The boy agrees, though his residence must remain a secret due to the rules of the retirement community. Life is good for a time; the boy hides under the sink whenever anyone comes over, and Ruth sneaks him food from the cafeteria. She encourages the boy to let his guard down and appreciate the good things in life, though he resists as much as he relents. But after an accident suffered during an impromptu vacation results in a dramatic shift in Ruth’s personality, the boy is forced to adapt—and learn about the interconnectedness of love and loss.
The boy narrates the story from the cusp of his adulthood, referring to Ruth as “you.” He channels his younger worldview as he does: “I tried not to think about cookies. I flipped through the puzzle book to distract myself. I told myself I would never go back to see you. Never ever. Not even for $1,000,000 worth of donuts. I started working on a medium-hard puzzle, messed up right away, and ripped the page out of the book.” The relationship between Ruth and the boy in the first half of the novel is a bit reminiscent of the film Harold and Maude (minus the romantic element); Ruth is a bighearted, language-loving extrovert who delights in nearly everything. Miller’s innovation comes in the book’s second half, when Ruth’s kindness to another boy backfires horribly, forcing the narrator to become her caretaker. From then on, the novel becomes an increasingly heartbreaking story of the boy realizing who Ruth really is to him and what he needs to be to her. Miller’s deeply felt tale illustrates how life’s greatest challenges always arrive before we’re ready for them, and how they shape us into the people we become.
A masterfully controlled tear-jerker of a novel about found family.Pub Date: June 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798990770904
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Lost Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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