A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.
In this novel, a retired English teacher in a small Southern town struggles to accept the death of her ex-husband.
Janet Hall has moved back to Trion, Alabama, the intellectually cloistered hometown she fled to study literature. Decades ago, she married Jacob Hall, an ambitious fiction writer she’d met in high school. They eventually divorced—he wanted kids and she desired a life of independence, and Janet could no longer tolerate his serial infidelity. But 35 years later, they remain close friends, with their lives deeply enmeshed, both unable to cut the “umbilicus of passion,” a memorable coinage in Courington’s poetically nimble tale. Janet still loves Jacob and neglects to restore her maiden name, and he remains entirely dependent on her editorial oversight of his writing. Despite some success, he’s filled with remorse that he’s never published a major novel or lived up to the excited expectations of his childhood teachers. Janet is in Trion after inheriting a house from a relative. She threatens to cut off Jacob, who lives in Illinois, if he won’t join her, and then she learns he’s dead, apparently from a heart attack. But Janet begins to suspect that he killed himself—he valorized the suicide of great authors like Hemingway as an act of heroism. She becomes obsessed with discovering if she is ultimately responsible for his death, a desperate investigation poignantly portrayed by the author. Courington delicately explores the ways in which literature can emancipate or imprison those devoted to it—it can crush dreams of grandeur just as easily as it can conjure them. The author powerfully captures the impossibility of ever fully leaving one’s past behind, a lesson finally learned by Janet: “As a kid, I felt trapped here, and Jacob became my way out—the beginning of a life filled with hope and ideas, the vision of a new day. He said small towns are for the small-minded. And I agreed. But I’ve begun to realize that my world is like a worn Samsonite suitcase I carry wherever I go—scratched and dented with locks that can pop open at any time.” This is an affectingly melancholic work, laced with insights and communicated in a quietly meditative prose.
A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798989451364
Page Count: 219
Publisher: All Things That Matter Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: yesterday
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