Riveting details of a fascinating hidden world support a ruthless takedown of misogyny and entitlement. One hell of a debut.
Inside the perfectly curated fortress of privilege that is the estate of a Hollywood billionaire, threatening tremors of a #MeToo earthquake are felt.
“Ted Stabler—the wunderkind who’d directed The Starfighter trilogy...was a late riser, but once he began his day he worked tirelessly, often until one or two in the morning. Teeing up the conditions he needed to task-shift seamlessly without squandering a minute would take all of Zanne’s focus.” Hart’s knowing, ripped-from-the-headlines debut takes us behind the scenes of Ted’s world on a day of reckoning—the day the Stablers host a “Bump and Pump” benefit for low-income women. Things get off to an inauspicious start when the party monkey pisses on the computer server, and sure enough, this is the day each of Ted's three wives (first wife, second wife, work wife) will watch the ugly truths of her position explode. Zanne Klein—described by her girlfriend as “Snow White, if Snow White was a daddy”—is the work wife, a queen bee in the hive of workers that includes everything from Ivy League graduates to a retired NFL star. Thanks to this group of people, Holly Stabler, Ted’s second wife, spends her days in what looks like glamorous ease but is actually infantilized hell. “Joe paid her bills, Flora made her bed, Erin made her doctor’s appointments and filled her prescriptions, Ilya and James drove her children to school, Katya packed their lunches, Mark hired and fired her household staff, Lauren tried on her clothes, Erin signed her name and impersonated her voice, Dawn and Zanne delivered her messages to Ted when he ducked her calls.” Holly is one of the few who know that Ted was previously married to a Korean American woman named Phoebe Lee, now an English teacher in the Bay Area. Phoebe was co-producer of the first two Starfighter flicks, but the couple split up before following through on their plan to produce her passion project, and she dropped out of sight. Now, after 20 years, she’s back in town. This book flies on a magic carpet of seamless, intricate detail, much of it from work experience the author acknowledges in an afterword. Whether we’re dropping in on Holly with her glam squad or watching in wonder as headset-wearing assistants track the movements of their bosses like world leaders, there’s never a moment's slip in authenticity or momentum.
Riveting details of a fascinating hidden world support a ruthless takedown of misogyny and entitlement. One hell of a debut.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-525-89976-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Graydon House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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