Sure, go ahead and pack this for your next long weekend—it’s fun! That said, it doesn’t really need to make the trip home.
Ellie’s beguiling, charismatic father may have had four children with three different women, but Ellie came first, literally and in his heart, too. When his perplexing bequest indicates otherwise, the 20-something reporter will use—and misuse—all her skills to uncover the truth.
It’s 2012, and 24-year-old Eleanor Adler is living her post-college, first-real-job best life. She’s in Washington, D.C., sharing a shambolic group home with roommates who clerk for federal judges and work at embassies and B-list agencies. She’s a junior reporter for Apogee, a news startup that exists to get clicks and save journalism. She’s seeing Lucas, a married 39-year-old think tanker, who takes her on dates to the Union Station food court and Maryland suburbs where they won’t be seen. Ellie’s hashtag-adulting takes a sudden and sad grown-up turn when her father unexpectedly drops dead in his Chesapeake Bay home. Although not exactly well-off, he was careful with his legacy, leaving each family member—third wife Colette; their son, Van; second-marriage daughters Sadie and Anna—a meaningful totem of his love. Except Ellie, who got a plastic gingerbread-man tie rack. It’s 100% true that said plastic tie rack is a rather flimsy MacGuffin on which to hang a plot, and the central-casting characters (size 12 Ellie doesn’t fit in and loves reading; attractive herbalist Colette visits a shaman) aren’t exactly compelling. It’s also true that they’re good enough company, especially when punctuated by sharp, spot-on observations of journalism (“They can comment after we publish”) and Washington life (“Sometimes it seemed as if people in their mid-twenties did all the work in D.C.”), informed by the author’s own decade reporting in the capital.
Sure, go ahead and pack this for your next long weekend—it’s fun! That said, it doesn’t really need to make the trip home.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-13429-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
