An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.
Schoolkids are as devious and dangerous as they are cute in Kelly’s slyly unsettling suspenser.
Tina is a single mom with a checkered past (she barely remembers the drunken hookup that derailed her life and produced her 10-year-old son Matty) who has a toehold in affluent Park Slope, Brooklyn, thanks to a below-market rental and a teaching job at L’il Learners preschool. She loves her charges—vomiting and poop jokes notwithstanding—but wonders about Jonah, a 3-year-old who never talks or plays, especially when his attacks on a little girl escalate from biting and hair-pulling to stabbing with a tack and worse. Jonah’s older sister Darla, Matty’s classmate, is also a problem; her more sophisticated bullying of an overweight boy named Byron progresses to subtle, disturbing bloodshed. Tina sympathizes with Jonah and Darla because their mother Laura recently died in a hiking accident (they say they can see her ghost) and grows even more sympathetic when she meets their handsome, ingratiating father Patrick. As Tina grows closer to Patrick and his kids, she puts aside others’ misgivings even as red flags appear, including hints that Laura’s death might not have been accidental. Kelly’s novel is a mordantly funny portrait of high-end preschools full of well-heeled, judgmental moms and exasperating, antic children. It’s also a plangent reflection on the fragility of relationships—Tina’s decade-long friendship with her landlady Cheryl, whose daughter Naomi she practically raised, goes by the wayside when Cheryl decides she wants more rent. The author’s clever, evocative prose illuminates characters in their labyrinthine complexity—especially Darla’s arresting mix of childishness and dark calculation. (“Darla hates the fat boy so much she would like to bite him and swallow the pieces. She wants to call him fatty-pants again, but this time Naomi and Matty would hear….Darla knows better than to show her friends what she feels.”) From this bad seed sprouts a page-turner.
An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.Pub Date: July 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988721369
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Flexible Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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