Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.
An 18-year-old girl in Manhattan faces the troubled summer of 1986.
In an author’s note prefacing her terrific debut, Weiner explains that she was inspired by her experiences during the summer of what became known as the Preppy Murder in Central Park. Her title quotes Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the effects of cocaine, a reference that occurs to her intelligent, articulate, insecure protagonist, Nina Jacobs, as she’s about to try the drug for the first time with her new friend Stephanie. It’s the summer before Nina leaves for college at Vanderbilt, and she spends her days temping at office jobs—there’s one working for a hotel chain, inputting the reports of undercover investigators on a Wang word processor; another, at an almanac that made incorrect weather predictions, has her sorting hate mail. By night, she hangs out with her friends at a bar called Flanagan’s, where they don’t card the underage patrons. There, she meets an extraordinarily handsome but moody boy named Gardner Reed, with whom she and every other girl in the place are wholly infatuated. Also taking up real estate in Nina’s anxious brain is her mother, whose mental illness manifests alternately as immobilizing despair, random cruelty, and—after a medication change—manic wordplay and shopping. Weiner’s recreation of the period and the milieu—the headlines, the music, the products—is like a perfect pointillist painting, all the tiny details adding up to a richly textured, authentic impression of the city as it was in that decade. Each of her young female characters—from the badass Stephanie, who snorts coke between customers at the fancy Maison Rouge housewares shop, to the snooty Holland Nichols, Gardner’s girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, to the crude but ballsy Alison Bloch, who’s braver than Nina in calling out the casual antisemitism of their prep school friends—is fully three-dimensional. With the strong young characters and the skin-crawling atmosphere created by creepy men, crimes in the news, porn shops, and overheated adolescent sexuality, the book recalls another excellent true crime–inspired novel, Emma Cline’s The Girls.
Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798843
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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