The blend of funny and serious is not working perfectly, but strong writing and sharply rendered dialogue rescues the read.
The further adventures of a single Black woman in South London.
As the title of Carty-Williams’ follow-up to the well-received Queenie (2019, now a Hulu TV series) indicates, her talented but troubled protagonist, now 33, doesn’t quite have her ducks in a row...yet. Having messed things up with her true love a few years earlier, her romantic life now consists of regular booty calls with a well-built public transportation worker who is several tube stops short of Mr. Right. Her work life as editorial director at a media startup is closer to satisfactory: “The Good Sis had been a life-changing place to work, and a far cry from my last workplace, where being the only Black woman in a five-mile radius had seen me go from pet to threat on an almost daily basis.” Now she gets to work on projects she really cares about, currently researching a story titled “The Race to Conceive: The Hidden Hurdles of a Black Woman’s Fertility Journey.” To get an inside look, she goes for a standard fertility checkup. But the bad news she gets there is not about racism. Contrary to her belief that she still has years to organize her life for motherhood, her hormone and egg counts are both low and dropping, and her high BMI disqualifies her for support from the public health system. Spiraling hard and fast, she launches campaigns to lose weight and get pregnant, ASAP. Again, Carty-Williams vividly evokes Jamaican diaspora culture and Queenie’s loving South London circle of friends and family, capturing voices ranging from Grandma—“Lord have mercy, me neva even seh mi prayers before mi drop ah sleep”—to millennial and Gen Z characters, with their emoji- and acronym-filled texts. Queenie herself is an endearing but frustrating character, annoyingly prone to self-sabotage, but many readers will empathize with her difficulty absorbing her therapist’s counsel that “preparing for sadness wouldn’t change how sad [she’d] be even if [her] worst fears came true.”
The blend of funny and serious is not working perfectly, but strong writing and sharply rendered dialogue rescues the read.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781982178116
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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