A beautifully written tale about Australian dreamers that pointedly captures them at a crucial time.
An Australian agriculture student forms a tightknit bond with creative friends and lovers who are planning for their futures in this literary novel.
Dara Mahoney is living with seven other students in Brisbane in 1961 in an old rooming house. They are agriculture students, but their hopes and dreams veer far from the secure futures their degrees promise. Dara carries a torch for Joe Gordon, who yearns to play the violin in Europe. Bill Hereward wishes to motorbike to India, and Cass Clayton wants to sing. The guys stay up late drinking and planning an ocean voyage on a catamaran. They all feel pressure to get married young but fear that a wedding may signal the end of their aspirations. Against the backdrop of the White Australia Policy, Cass is in a relationship with Ling Chang, an Indonesian facing deportation. Doug Jarratt wants to marry Tripta Srivastava, a beautiful Indian doctor and dancer, but she’s thinking of the fallout from her family back home. Dara is defiant about marriage, in part because she had parents who fought (“She hadn’t lived with two mad people for nine years without learning the rudiments of good drama”). Joe pairs off with Klari Nadassy, an immigrant who fled war-torn Hungary, losing her ballet career and becoming a teacher. As tragedy strikes the group, Dara must decide if following her heart means she has to give up her dreams. De Valera’s powerful coming-of-age tale doesn’t shy away from tackling difficult subjects. The strongly drawn characters are young, bright, and artistic, and the author is keenly aware of the emotional states of those raised during World War II (“Sixteen years had passed since the end of World War II, but Dara and her crowd remembered it well: the threat of a Japanese invasion had hung over all their childhoods. From February 1942 onwards, searchlights raked the night skies”). The Brisbane “Mates” aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty working in the fields or to confront any serious problem head-on. Cass, in particular, deals with horrifying acts of misogyny while Doug tackles Aboriginal rights. There is a multitude of issues raised in this story, but de Valera has woven everything together with vivid, dynamic prose.
A beautifully written tale about Australian dreamers that pointedly captures them at a crucial time.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9942745-6-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Old Tiger Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: tomorrow
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