Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.
Helping a sick horse gives a washed-up musician in his 60s a chance to make peace with his past.
“Please,” whispers Al Ward, “please give me the strength to pull the trigger and let it be over.” Al isn’t contemplating suicide. An old horse has wandered into the abandoned Nevada mining camp that Al calls home, and he wants to put it out of its misery. The camp belonged to his late great-uncle Mel, who mined it for years with no success. Al would stay there and dry out whenever the excesses of life as a journeyman guitarist and songwriter became too much. But now the horse, scarred and bleeding from a coyote bite, intrudes on the camp, where Al has been holed up and hiding from his demons. The horse doesn’t do anything to provoke him. It just stands there in the snow, right outside the assayer’s office where Al sleeps, eats, thinks, and still writes songs by lantern light. When Al decides to show mercy and points his old .357 at the animal, he tearfully realizes that he can’t kill the poor beast “because he felt that he and the horse were the same.” It’s a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force. A songwriter and band frontman, Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician’s life, and his experiences inform Al’s long career playing casinos from Las Vegas to Reno to Tahoe and beyond. Al has a gift for songwriting, and plenty of tortured musicians—including heartbreaker Mona and the self-destructive Sanchez Brothers—clamored after him to write hits for them. Al never wished for much in life, only, as he says of the horse, to “be all right and live an all right life.” He’s managed to have plenty of all right moments, especially during his short-lived marriage to his true love, Maxine. Helping the horse might give him a chance to have another one. After Al makes a long trek to get help, a friend teases him that what he’s done “says something. Most people wouldn’t cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you’re a drunk, lazy musician.” But Al’s risky walk shows he’s more than that; he’s still full of surprises.
Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063346574
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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