The follow-up to The Children of the Children (reviewed here), The Catchings Press is a literary coming-of-age novel set in 1967-68, in the fictional small town of Catchings, Texas. It’s McMillion’s second novel, and it shares its interest in institutional power and control with that book, though in a considerably different way: here the setting is a newspaper family rather than a religious. The book is narrated in first person by sixteen-year-old Annette Calvert, told as a retrospective, an adult looking back on the year her family’s world came apart. You definitely don’t have to have read The Children of the Children to enjoy this book, though if possible I would recommend reading them together, for reasons you will find out.
The plot starts with a rigged family “vote,” when Annette’s father, an ambitious journalist, decides to buy a small-town newspaper and soon the family lands in Catchings. From there, the book follows Annette, her rebellious older brother Danny, and her sensitive younger brother Paul as they adjust to life in Catchings. It’s the kind of plot premise that’s subtly intriguing without needing a dramatic hook.
At school, a tyrannical superintendent and a sadistic biology teacher enforce a punishing dress and hair code. Before long, the newspaper’s coverage of the school board’s misconduct and the town’s racial double standards costs the family several major advertisers, straining the business and the family’s finances. Against the backdrop of Vietnam, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the Chicago riots, Annette falls for a Black classmate, watches her brother Danny struggle with a growing rage at the injustice around him that culminates in his public humiliation, and eventually organizes a student petition against the dress code that leads to a tense school board showdown.
Obviously, this is an important period of history, and what works best here is how immersively the book brings it to life. The author doesn’t just namedrop 1968’s headlines. She skillfully knits in not just historical events in the background of the story, but references like the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album, which would have just come out. Likewise, the novel handles its pretty heavy period themes of racism and sexism without feeling too dark, and none of it feels simplified for effect. It has a classic literary fiction, Steinbeck-esque quality, the kind of book that feels like it could have been shelved as a modern classic decades ago rather than published now.
The book also has a deeply important message of challenging authority. There’s a moral running through the whole book that pushing back against what’s wrong is worth doing even when you’re a teenager, even when the “rule” seems small. Every generation gets its own version of that test. The book doesn’t pretend fighting authority is easy or always successful, but it insists that silence and compliance are worse.
The battle I fought when I was sixteen loomed large for years. Now, it seems minor. I was the daughter of a white publisher, and more privileged than I realized. All subsequent tyrants pale next to those of my youth. Yet I can’t help thinking that sometimes it is also the small battles we wage in life that cause the world to change.
The villains of the book are highly unlikable in a way that the best villains are. Superintendent Bic Harold and biology teacher Fred Frasier are petty, small-town bullies whose power comes almost entirely from bureaucratic cover, which is what makes them so unsettling. It’s the kind of villainy that’s so casual it feels recognizable in all our lives, “Frasier screamed, loud enough for the school’s entire east wing to hear, “You get your hair cut today, boy, or else!”
The writing style is relatively spare, far from purple prose, which makes sense given the narration style and how steeped the novel is in the mechanics of a small-town newspaper. Annette’s narration favors short, declarative sentences and dry, observational humor over sentimentality, even when the subject matter turns dark. It’s a style that feels like hearing someone tell you an interesting story about their adolescence, and this prose gives the handful of moments where the writing does turn lyrical a more powerful effect.
The pacing of the book is strong, even though because the novel is committed to its journalistic style, it occasionally trades momentum for verisimilitude, and readers looking for a faster plot engine may find some of the board-meeting sequences a bit procedural even (while always admiring how carefully researched they are). That’s not really a complaint, given how much those scenes ultimately deliver about how power actually operates in a place like Catchings and how well the book is constructed in general.
The family dynamic of the Calvert family is beautifully rendered, and they all feel like real people. My favorite character is probably Marian. She starts the book looking like a fairly passive figure, and by the end she’s a fearless advocate for her family and the truth. The book also has an interracial romance subplot between Annette and her classmate Bobby that is handled with real sensitivity, never forcing a happy resolution the era likely couldn’t have given them.
In the end, The Catchings Press succeeds because of its timely themes and likeable, rootable characters and the way you’ll want to see what happens to each of them long after you’ve closed the book. By the time Annette stands in front of the school board with her petition, the reader has spent nearly three hundred pages getting attached to her. It’s a novel that trusts readers to sit with difficult topics and slow-building tension without giving them easy answers, and that patience pays off in a story that lingers.
Final verdict: For fans of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Help, and classic literary fiction, The Catchings Press is a beautifully crafted book about how the big fractures of a nation show up in the small fights of a single town.
Thank you to the author for the advance copy. The Catchings Press comes out October 9th!
