Layered, variable, and, like spoiled orange juice, sometimes complicatedly bitter.
A woman on the cusp of adulthood navigates a troubled relationship with her abusive mother.
Among her siblings, 18-year-old Lily has always been known as their mother’s undisputed favorite—“Mama’s doll,” the only one capable of concocting the semispoiled orange juice May favors and soothing her public meltdowns at grocery stores. Unlike her combative sister, Julia, and anxious lawyer brother, Jacob, Lily hews steadfastly to her mother’s rigid expectations, even dyeing her hair dark and wearing color contacts to appear more Chinese (May is Chinese Peranakan and her husband is White). As Lily prepares to enter Oxford in the fall, she subsists on the faith that she must endure only a few weeks more of her mother’s chaos before escaping. But after May accuses Lily’s father of harboring a secret love for Jacob’s ex-wife, Francie, her unpredictability only accelerates—precipitating a string of dramatic family showdowns, public confrontations, and other crises. Simultaneously, Lily is dogged by increasingly frequent flashbacks of some kind that pop into her consciousness, which she suspects may offer clues to her mother’s tragedy-riddled childhood in Singapore (involving, hazily, a devastating fire, a car accident, and the untimely death of a family member). As the summer passes—and with the help of Lewis, a young professor and kindred spirit—Lily weighs the two selves she’s come to know: the one that’s been rigidly formed in her mother’s image and the other whose outlines are blurrier but full of possibility. Debut author King skillfully brings to light the layered, deeply complex machinations that lurk below the surface in families and confer the fragile impression of normalcy; this family’s crosshairs of obligation, love, and resentment, too, are never oversimplified. May is especially captivating: a veritable tyrant who’s also full of sympathetic, deeply human insecurities. Though a few narrative elements are inelegantly constructed—Lily’s flashbacks often read as a plot device—King expertly weaves a compelling family novel.
Layered, variable, and, like spoiled orange juice, sometimes complicatedly bitter.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66260-149-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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