A smart, rhythmic, and unflinching relationship tale with a strong cast.
In this novel, a trio of female friends face rising costs and the challenges of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in mid-1990s New York City.
New York is expensive. Rent prices soar and groceries become hard to come by for three 30-something pals and their partners. The setting of the intriguing misadventures of Allie Squerciati, Rihanna Strauss, and Natia Stojanovich feels real and lived-in. Some characters share an apartment divided by a measly curtain, and others trade counterfeit money to help get through financial hardship. Yet this New York is sexy and exciting nonetheless. These heroes are plucky and entertaining. There’s Allie—this ensemble’s lead—whose narrative jump-starts the story when her boyfriend dies of a drug overdose. Her tale picks up steam as she learns to cope with her tragic loss and finds herself in the company of a new man: the energetic, chaotic rocker Izaak Sawicki, aka Pest. Allie and Pest’s relationship is messy, complicated, and compulsively readable, with a soundtrack of heavy metal and noisy punk music. At one point, Pest gives Allie a rundown of his rap sheet (“Assaulting a police officer, armed robbery…ummm, I think that’s it”), to which she confesses that she has “a thing for rabid dogs.” Much like Allie, who falls for Pest—despite his stints in juvie and jail—D’Amato extends an enormous amount of empathy to the troubled musician. Pest’s flashbacks, which often begin the chapters about this group of friends, are among the most harrowing. Meanwhile, Rihanna has a knotty, borderline toxic relationship with Dylan Gillespie, who owns a ferryboat that he rents out for parties. And Natia seems absolutely smitten—against the wills of her conservative parents—with musician Danny Benton. These intersecting narratives nicely complement one another, offering intriguing reflections on what is happening in the lives of other characters. All of this is buoyed by the author’s clear prose and dry humor—highlights of which include an excellent use of lists at the beginning of the story. Like the music that captures the attention of the characters, D’Amato’s novel is a catchy anthem of friendship and the city.
A smart, rhythmic, and unflinching relationship tale with a strong cast.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-290-8
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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