Can a book that's languidly paced and discursive also be a joy? Yes.
A novel about the power of music for a misfit teen in 1980s small-town Minnesota—like a more rueful, meditative High Fidelity.
It's 1999, and Matt Carnap is back in his dying hometown, living in the apartment his uncle has created for him in the press box of a disused municipal football stadium. Matt is spinning his wheels, wandering downtown to catalog its ruins and reminiscing about what he now considers his golden age—the tween years, when his mom (now dead) was married to Russ, a charming, unambitious record collector who spent his time and passion DJing in the roller rink he owned. Matt's mother was distant, even neglectful, and the marriage was never hardy, but she couldn't fail to see the value in the alliance her awkward boy, suffering from attention-deficit issues and a lifelong, horrendous case of insomnia, forged with his stepfather around rock and funk and skating. Eventually she took up with another man, a nightmarish theater and music teacher/blowhard in a nearby town, and Matt had to move with her into what seemed wretched exile. The rink closed, and Russ took up the itinerant life of the DJ who insists on naming his own tunes. In the years since, Matt's lost track of Russ, and part of the impetus for moving back is the hope of reconnection. This novel has several features that sound fatal: It's relentlessly inward (the insular Matt rarely engages with anyone), backward-looking (about 90% flashback), with minimal plot; the tone is nostalgic, even in the end a little hokey; long sections consist largely of playlists of cool music of the 1970s and '80s. And yet it's a pleasure: smart, with lots of sentence-level snap, and with much to say about the way that music—really any of life's animating pleasures and passions, but especially music, for a lonely child of late-20th-century America—becomes not merely a backdrop or soundtrack, but the thread along which one strings a life.
Can a book that's languidly paced and discursive also be a joy? Yes.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56689-639-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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
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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