An earnest if not entirely successful tale of generations-old social and racial divisions.
A mixed-race girl comes of age in South Carolina communities leery of accepting her.
“You’re half-Black, half-Cherokee, and all mixed up,” says Blue, the grandmother of Ophelia, the protagonist of Downing’s debut novel. Opening in 1993, when Ophelia is 7, and following her to 2005 and her early adulthood, the novel tracks her in three milieus. The first is Etsi, a town where Blue teaches Ophelia Cherokee lore on what was a former reservation. Later, she moves in with her aunt in Stone River, a predominantly Black community, where she’s treated by her Black cousins and classmates as a misfit—bookish, quiet, and overly proud of her suspect Native heritage. An escape hatch seems to appear in the form of La Belle École, a school designed for gifted Black children, but that puts Ophelia into the orbit of a predominantly white high-school culture that largely shuns her as well. More precisely, it introduces her to the Beauregard clan, a white farming family that’s ruled much of the region’s economy—and poisoned the river in Etsi. As studies of racial divisions, Downing’s conflicts can feel tidily straightforward at times, which makes Ophelia’s sense of being out of place feel repetitive; the final conflict involves a familiar trope, and a magical-realist gesture isn’t persuasive. But if Ophelia’s path is bluntly allegorical, the novel is enlivened by its secondary characters, particularly Blue and Belle, the founder of La Belle École, both hard-charging and no-nonsense types. Downing’s story opens up questions about how much separate racial communities can intermingle while still preserving their identities, and shows how those overlaps can prompt power struggles, sometimes vicious ones. But it lacks a strong, surprising character at its center.
An earnest if not entirely successful tale of generations-old social and racial divisions.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781668066102
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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: today
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