Is Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus Worth Reading? A Zany Poetry-Magazine Comedy

Is Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus worth reading if you loved Lessons in Chemistry and fear the difficult second novel? On the reviews published since its 13 October 2026 release, yes — with one honest caveat about pace. Bonnie Garmus’s second novel, a 432-page hardcover from Scribner, swaps Elizabeth Zott’s chemistry lab for a cultish New York poetry magazine in the early 1980s, and reviewers are split mainly on how fast it moves, not on whether the jokes land (Beyond the Book Ends).

The bar was absurd. Lessons in Chemistry has sold 9 million copies worldwide, spent the best part of two years on the Sunday Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages and became an Emmy-winning TV series, the Guardian’s review noted (The Guardian via GhanaMMA). No follow-up clears that bar commercially. The better question is whether this one is good company for 432 pages.

Peck & Peck Bonnie Garmus review consensus: funny first, saggy second

The Peck & Peck Bonnie Garmus review consensus starts with laughter. The Guardian called it “laugh-out-loud funny” and “a paean to the power of poetry,” praising a zany office comedy with shades of Hogwarts — a glass dome, a pneumatic tube delivery system, alphabetised balcony topiary — and the gleeful originality of early John Irving (The Guardian via GhanaMMA). BookBrowse, rating it 4.4 out of 5 across 10 reviews, called it an “overstuffed, Dickensian romp” that sparkles with farcical scenes and dialogue (BookBrowse).

Then the caveat, repeated almost word for word across otherwise warm reviews. The Guardian said the story “sags a little in the middle” while mostly zipping along (The Guardian via GhanaMMA). One reader-reviewer was blunter: the first half felt “pretty tedious with not a whole lot of action,” and the book only caught fire once the history of the magazine and its mysterious twins took over, earning 3.25 stars out of 5 (The NeverEnding Book Collection).

BookBrowse logged smaller irritations too: people persistently calling the narrator “Banner,” “Baxter” or “Beater” stops being funny, some international editors stay one-dimensional, and the villain is “too overtly villainous” (BookBrowse). None of its reviewers called the book dull overall — “engaging from first page to last” was its closing line (BookBrowse).

Batter Gray, twinless twin, in the basement

The narrator is the gamble. Batter Gray is a twinless twin — his identical brother died at birth — named after his mother’s heroic dog, raised by a typeface-designer mother and a history-teacher father, and obsessed with poetry from childhood (BookBrowse). He lands his dream job at Peck & Peck, the most prestigious and dysfunctional poetry quarterly in the world, and is promptly exiled to the basement to make photocopies (Beyond the Book Ends).

The magazine runs on rules a normal office would call arson-adjacent. Its 39 editors exist to publish the world’s finest poems; failed submissions, thousands a week, are incinerated by a mailroom team of prison parolees, and the magazine famously sends postcards reading “NO” in an enormous font to 99.5% of applicants (The Guardian via GhanaMMA; BookBrowse). Batter is soon caught between the magazine’s two editors-in-chief — Salton Peck, a former stockbroker who wants ads and celebrity submissions, and his twin Declonius, who went to prison for embezzlement, is barred from the building, and wants the old standards back (BookBrowse).

Doubles are the book’s engine: twins in three generations of owners, truth against lies, rejection against acceptance, and a narrator whose surname is literally Gray (BookBrowse). Readers who found the preternaturally clever dog Six-Thirty too much in Lessons in Chemistry should brace themselves — the Guardian warned that Batter’s namesake, a rescue dog with credulity-stretching heroics, will vex the same readers again (The Guardian via GhanaMMA).

Peck & Peck vs Lessons in Chemistry: same voice, smaller cause

Peck & Peck vs Lessons in Chemistry is the comparison every review makes, and the honest answer is that the voice survives while the cause shrinks. Batter’s mother Rainey, a truth-telling, typeface-fixated presence, is “a ringer for Elizabeth Zott,” the Guardian said, while conceding that endangered poetry “does not exactly sit alongside feminism as a rousing call to arms” (The Guardian via GhanaMMA). BookBrowse found the same deep-dive pleasure transposed: geeky discussion of poetics and typefaces does the work chemistry did last time (BookBrowse).

One dissenting reader put the personal version of that gap plainly: Batter is likeable, but his inner musings were not riveting, and the story might have been better told from another character’s point of view (The NeverEnding Book Collection). Beyond the Book Ends, gifted a copy, landed at the opposite pole, calling it a favourite of the year and “an extended metaphor where poetry is life” that even non-poetry readers can relate to (Beyond the Book Ends).

Verdict: is Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus worth reading?

Analysis: Buy it if you read Lessons in Chemistry for the jokes, the oddballs and the sermon hiding inside the comedy — all three are here, aimed at gatekeepers who burn poems instead of chemists barred from labs. Wait for the paperback if a slow first half is your dealbreaker, because three separate reviews flagged the pacing unprompted. It won’t outsell its predecessor; the Guardian itself doubted that (The Guardian via GhanaMMA). As a second novel, though, it does the hard thing: it is unmistakably hers, and about something else entirely.

Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sources

1. https://www.ghanamma.com/2026/10/13/peck-peck-by-bonnie-garmus-review-the-zany-follow-up-to-lessons-in-chemistry/
2. https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/5303/peck-peck#reviews
3. https://www.beyondthebookends.com/summary-of-peck-peck-by-bonnie-garmus/
4. https://theneverendingbookcollection.substack.com/p/book-review-peck-and-peck-by-bonnie