Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.
A story of family, fury, a missing girl, and what society doesn't see.
Twelve years ago, 13-year-old Ruthy Ramirez disappeared after track practice one day, never to be seen again. Left in the black hole where there is “no such thing now as a map” are the women in Ruthy's family, who never get over her loss. Told from the alternating perspectives of Ruthy’s younger and older sisters, Nina and Jessica; her mother, Dolores; and Ruthy herself, this is a story of the fights women encounter and the ways they survive, set in a Pentecostal Puerto Rican community in Staten Island. More than a decade after Ruthy’s disappearance, Jessica is convinced she's seen her on Catfight, a reality TV series where women literally fight their cast-mates to stay in the town house where they're filming and win the grand prize. Jessica and Nina begin binge-watching the show, analyzing every detail about the woman onscreen, comparing her with their memories of Ruthy and their expectations of whether a near-homeless raging alcoholic is the woman Ruthy could have grown up to become. They try to keep this secret from their diabetic mother, but their plan unravels when Dolores figures out that they're not heading off to a retreat for young Christian women but are instead driving to Boston, where the show is filmed. The three end up road-tripping together, along with a friend, and it’s Dolores, not her daughters, who schemes her way into a nightclub where the Catfight girls will perform. There’s a delightfully subversive and maverick quality to the way first-time novelist Jiménez gives her characters the freedom to tell the truth as they see it, whether it’s Dolores negotiating with God in expletive-laden prayers or Nina explaining the fallout of graduating from college with an expensive biology degree only to end up folding lingerie for a toxic White boss. The book's humor alongside Jiménez's willingness to include everything from pop culture to intergenerational trauma is the reason this book is a page-turner.
Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781538725962
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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