Sharp characters and a striking depiction of friendship within a story that never quite coheres.
An often funny debut novel about three friends searching for love and themselves in a rapidly gentrifying Detroit.
Dominick, Troy, and Remy, three Black gay men in Detroit, are at a key turning point in their lives. After having caught his boyfriend in bed with another man and gotten fired from his job on the same day, Dominick Gibson packed up his car, left Manhattan, and, as the book opens, is driving back to his mom’s house in Detroit. Dominick is unsure what’s next for him, but he feels the clock ticking: “Here he was now, thirty-three years old and with eight years with his ex, Justin, having led absolutely nowhere. Time was running out. Though when you’re Black, gay, and thirtysomething, time always feels like it’s running out.” Dominick reconnects with Troy Clements, his best friend, who's a socially minded teacher at The Mahaffey School in a neighborhood primed for “redevelopment”—or, in other words, bulldozers. Like so many Detroit residents, Troy is unsure about his city’s future. As he tells Dominick, “My worry is that it won’t be a Black city anymore. That it’s not going to belong to us like it used to. White people have started moving here in droves. Every time you look up—Dan Gilbert! New restaurant! New this, new that! And my thing is, I’m looking at my kids at Mahaffey and their families, and I know they won’t be able to keep up when it hits.” The final member of the trio is Troy's friend Remy Patton, a real estate agent who goes by “Mr. Detroit.” When Remy takes on a project that threatens Troy’s school, all three men have to decide where their loyalties lies. Foley’s novel paints a vivid picture of Detroit gentrification pushing African American residents out in favor of high-priced condos, bougie restaurants, and new, White residents. The novel also excels at showing the ups and downs of the dating scene in Detroit. Dominick, Troy, and Remy experience steamy hookups, genuine connections, awkward encounters with closeted White men from the suburbs, and even an attempted rape. Foley has created original, striking characters; unfortunately, alternating among all three points of view sacrifices some of the plot’s momentum. Each man goes through dramatic ups and downs, but the larger story gets lost along the way.
Sharp characters and a striking depiction of friendship within a story that never quite coheres.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953368-25-6
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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