Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.
When the world’s first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath, measured in unraveling lives.
“Twenty-four hours ago I was a wealthy surgeon’s wife leaving my huge house with three kids and a dog in a hybrid SUV. Now I’m a sweating, penniless refugee dragging a wheelie bag up a rural road.” In the lingo of Holsinger’s ambitious novel, former rich White lady and sculptor Daphne Larsen-Hall is now an IDP, an Internally Displaced Person—aka a Luna, for the hurricane that created a whole new class of Americans, numbering in the millions. Luna “strikes Miami as if beating on some mountain-size drum....She moves like a drunken butcher, flaying skyscrapers, eviscerating offices and conference rooms and lobbies....The guts of civilization swarm and fly: desks, chairs, tables, carpets, lights, plants, computers, printers, books, and papers by the billions, landing in the rivered streets, pulped through the sewer channels, chewed by the winds.” Holsinger's lush writing about the storm is complemented by “The Great Displacement: A Digital Chronicle of the Luna Migration,” an interactive website including interview transcripts, maps, and charts, displayed here as screenshots. For example, one survivor, now a Ph.D. in critical disaster studies, reports, “Doesn’t surprise me that what finally focused the nation’s attention on the megashelters was that spectacle in Oklahoma, what went down at Tooley Farm. There you had a perfect storm of climate change, displacement, extremism, and racial difference swirling around these white bodies at the center of it all, the big pale eye of the storm.” Interspersed with these reports are chapters telling Daphne’s story as well as those of her three difficult children (her teenage stepson, Gavin, maliciously leaves her purse in the driveway when they flee); the African American woman who runs Tooley Farm for FEMA; the drug dealer/insurance agent who is there to squeeze every penny he can get out of the refugees; and his sidekick/girlfriend, a guitar player who starts the cover band that gives the book its title. From Range, a complicated street game all the children are playing, to wildfire, the opiate many of their parents are getting addicted to, Holsinger's storm of invented detail is Category 6.
Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18971-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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