A surprising tale about motherhood, friendship, and reawakening after life’s transitions.
After giving birth, a disillusioned woman makes wild choices as she tries to rediscover the person she used to be.
Fifteen years past college, Emily finds herself horribly unsatisfied. She’s on maternity leave from her ho-hum job, recovering slowly from a difficult childbirth, and feeling increasingly isolated from her husband and friends. She remembers her college roommate, Daisy, as her one true soul mate but, unfortunately, the women lost touch after freshman year, when Daisy got involved with drugs, stripping, and other unsavory activities. Now, Emily’s desperate to track her down. After sleuthing at out-of-town strip clubs and visiting Daisy’s grandmother in a nursing home, Emily discovers that Daisy’s been living nearby for years, with a mysterious man providing a life of luxury. Daisy brings Emily into her strange and extravagant life, which includes a vacant Park Avenue building where the women decide to create a high-end club for new mothers. The privileges Daisy shares with Emily get progressively murkier, until Emily begins to wonder whether Daisy is who she thought at all. Narrated by Emily, the book gets off to a slow start as her quest to find Daisy drags on, and the plot feels like a low-stakes search for an old friend. After the two reconnect a third of the way through, the story takes on more life, and the oddities of the world they build together effectively increase the tale’s dark humor and suspense. Chozick does an admirable job of creating a strange microcosm of intense, image-conscious Manhattan, where the self-doubt, loneliness, and pressure of new motherhood are juxtaposed with the excess and superficiality of high society. While certain aspects of Emily’s life, like her relationship with her husband, lack detail, Chozick provides extensive, graphic descriptions in other areas, such as the physical trauma Emily suffered during the baby’s difficult delivery and her ongoing pain and follow-up treatments.
A surprising tale about motherhood, friendship, and reawakening after life’s transitions.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217046546
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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