A novel that disturbingly shows what happens when success leaves no room for one’s humanity.
A novel written in the style of an extended clinical file shows how a man falls apart when he tries to turn himself into a machine.
Bennett Vann has made his life about being efficient. He thinks he can control everything, including what’s right and wrong. He believes that to be successful, he must get rid of anything he deems unnecessary, including people. This strategy initially works for him: He gets ahead, becomes powerful, and works within the system to elevate himself above others. But then, over time, something changes. Bennett Vann decides that he wants to be kind in a world that only cares about winning. From this point on, he unsuccessfully tries to do two things at once: He wants to win, and he also wants to care about people. His goal is to achieve success without causing harm to others. This new approach causes problems inside his mind: He takes longer to make decisions, and they’re not as clear as they were before. He starts to feel like a person, not just an efficient machine. Using a collection of reports and notes (written by a “shadow scribe”), the author has composed the novel in such a way that a sense of tension-filled distance is created from the audience. Reading through the pages is like looking at a file of information or a scientific report instead of a novelistic narrative. In the end, readers must try to piece together everything that happens, like a puzzle; the audience knows that Bennett Vann is living his life, but he’s being watched as well. The author, who makes it clear how Bennett goes from being in control of his life to being unstable, trades in icy humor and stark irony throughout. For example, when Bennett whispers “You’re looking limp, Johnson” to a plant, it shows how disconnected he’s become from real life. He tries to get his humanity back, but in trying to retrieve it, he’ll have to rely on the system that took it from him in the first place.
A novel that disturbingly shows what happens when success leaves no room for one’s humanity.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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