An engaging and scabrous alternative-universe farce about the American government.
In this satire, sham news articles, memos, prose, and dialogue transcriptions follow the fantastical fortunes of the George H.W. Bush presidential dynasty, whose members are human-alien hybrids in thrall to insect extraterrestrials and opposed by a group of talking fish and others.
Robinson delves into the conspiracies and extremes of the UFO and Edgar Cayce cults for this broad lampoon. The premise proposes that Texas broke off from the United States to become a right-wing/racist police state. The New England family of patrician Prescott Bush is appointed to the Texas presidency and intelligence services. It turns out that all of Earth’s ruling elite families are secretly human-alien hybrids who answer to ageless, spaceship-riding insect ETs from Atlantis. The principal insect agent is W. Averell Harriman, aka Dogsbody Harriman, a praying mantis. Dogsbody’s foes are the Lemurians, who include talking fish and mer-people. They are led by a lunar diving beetle forced off the moon by Atlantean aggression. Prominent on the beetle side: Abraham Lincoln, occasionally sighted in Texas aquatic habitats astride a horned “devil-water-cow.” The narrative becomes alt-history shaped by fish versus bug intrigues. Bush scions George H.W. and George W. are both disappointing clones, given to multiple malapropisms (“This really gets my groat, people correcting my English”). Though they are promised prominence by Dogsbody, subversion by the fishy terrorists and the maneuverings of rivals John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon thwart the Bush family’s ambitions temporarily. There are assassinations, drug smuggling, the invasion of Panama, sexual perversions, and the Reverend Moon. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the most famous Bush family escapades (attacks on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession) do not enter into the picture. The complex burlesque recalls such surreal confabulations as Robert Mayer’s I, JFK (1989) and Chuck Barris’ Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984). In its best parts, Robinson’s yarn captures the nasty wit of vintage National Lampoon political parodies; other times, it treads into bad taste, working real-life tragedies (First Lady Laura Bush’s teenage car fatality) into the kooky cosmology. The striking tale provides redeeming social value in the occasional impressions of the government encompassing amoral power blocs and game players, treating the common folk as so many insects as they scheme outrageously for control and privilege.
An engaging and scabrous alternative-universe farce about the American government.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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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: Oct. 15, 2026
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