An astute anatomy of a decadent cultural milieu.
In this novel, a rivalrous friendship in Northern California during the tech boom of the 1990s comes to a spectacular crescendo.
Steve Galanos didn’t initially like his colleague John Goertz. When John warned the phone company for which they worked of the impending disaster that came to be known as Y2K, Steve thought it was an opportunistic career move, especially since it was only 1994. But John’s case proved convincing, and he was rewarded for what was seen as his diligent prescience, an outcome that rankled Steve: “This was his master plan all along. Point out this ridiculous problem, scare everyone, and get himself a promotion.” Nevertheless, while working together on the newly created Year 2000 Conversion Team, they both discover they have a lot in common, and the two become best friends. But while John is an ambitious perfectionist on his way to building a dream life—he weds Mary, makes a killing when a new company he works for launches a successful IPO, and buys a $1 million house—Steve feels trapped in an unfulfilling career without any hopes for improvement. Not surprisingly, his feelings of inadequacy emerge in the form of profound envy: “I was completely jealous, just like on that first day I had met him. Who was this guy and what had he done to deserve all of this?” Cuesta delicately portrays Steve’s mounting discontent mixed with genuine fraternity—in fact, his jealously is only explicable in the context of his very real affection for his best friend. But when John hosts a housewarming party at his new home in swanky Los Gatos, the friendly competitiveness between them turns sinister.
The author paints a rich tableau of Northern California during the frenetically optimistic days of the tech industry and—as Y2K demonstrated—the feverish capacity for overheated fearmongering. It was a time when considerable fortunes were eagerly made and quickly lost. As John climbs the ladder of corporate success, Steve is laid off. In addition, Cuesta limns a devilishly complex psychology of envy, which plumbs the peculiar relationship between love and loathing. Finally, the author captures an emotional emptiness at the core of corporate striving, one humorously expressed in the way John handles his spirituality: “It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. He did. Firmly. And he especially believed in God’s omnipresence. And the only way he knew how to deal with that—that is, live without the fetters of conviction while God watched—was to postpone thinking about God altogether. Just as with any other chore or task, he was simply procrastinating, setting it in the back of his mind, willing to deal with it later.” The plot can drag a bit—even for a shorter novel—and the granular presentation of drearily flat lives eventually begins to take on a tedium of its own. Readers will wonder if this tale would have been more successful as a short story. Still, the ending is as unpredictable as it is thrilling, and the novel as a whole is a keen peek into a hollow culture.
An astute anatomy of a decadent cultural milieu.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-957885-00-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Celestial Eyes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
