An uncompromising and engrossing tale of striving for success among greedy opportunists.
In Wolfe’s novel, friends and partners dive headfirst into the fierce corporate world to realize their dream of starting their own company.
When investment bank Kauffman Schwartz passes out innovator awards, wealth advisor Ted Sullivan goes home empty-handed. The plan had been for both Ted and his friend, investment banker Alec Young, to win in their respective divisions at the Arizona company; that would have been a great selling point for their future private equity firm, Sullivan Young, which has been their dream since they met six years earlier as KS interns. They’ve also been lovers for some time but have kept their romance a secret. (While Ted is openly gay, Alec hides his own sexuality from his conservative family, which includes an abusive father.) Complicating matters, Alec is also dating Emma Peterson, whom he’s using to get access to her “consulting titan” dad—this is another element of Ted and Alec’s long-term strategy to get investments for Sullivan Young. The two are fully aware that they may have to resort to cutthroat means, such as when handling Ted’s colleague, the “innovator” who wins and flaunts the award that Ted wants. Most of the people surrounding them are just as ruthlessly ambitious as they lie, deceive, and sometimes commit outright crimes. In many instances, when Ted and Alec feel as if everything is on track, something unexpected throws them off course. But when one particular event forces them to accelerate their plan, there’s no turning back; either their dream will become a reality or they’ll lose it all.
Wolfe effectively develops two strong leads. They come from drastically different backgrounds: Ted grew up on an Oklahoma farm and Alec’s father runs a successful business selling industrial machinery. At times, they seem avaricious; Sullivan Young focuses on green energy not to benefit the environment but because “there is money to be made in alternative energy.” But these two, who clearly love one another, are more devious than malicious, and many of the sneaky things they do are in response to someone else’s arguably worse offense. (That, however, may change as they move closer to their goal.) While Alec has suffered hardships in his past, the portrayal of Ted feels more intimate, exemplified by his first-person narration alternating with Alec’s third-person perspective. (Ted is haunted by a dark secret that gradually comes to light, and he struggles to overcome self-esteem issues.) Although many of the characters are unsavory, especially in the latter half, two are welcome exceptions: Ted’s ever-sympathetic cousin Dana and Alec’s warmhearted younger sister Alice. The author rounds out the narrative with memorable visual descriptions, as when he equates relief with “witnessing the emergency helicopter swoosh in after being stranded on a mountaintop, inundated by spiteful snakes and cold-blooded reptiles.” This all leads to a final act and an ending that readers won’t likely forget anytime soon.
An uncompromising and engrossing tale of striving for success among greedy opportunists.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798991301800
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 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
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
