Creepy, meta, and a whole lot of fun.
In this sprawling, structurally ambitious novel, the gruesome deaths of two turn-of-the-century boarding school girls haunt generations of women and the women they love.
"It's a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after." Unusual things happen at Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school situated along the wild, rocky Rhode Island coastline. In 1902, Brookhants pupils become obsessed with Mary MacLane's salacious memoir, I Await the Devil's Coming. Detailing MacLane's lust for "the anemone lady" and her refusal of traditional gender norms, the book gives rise to the Plain Bad Heroine Society. When the club's leaders, Florence Hartshorn and Clara Broward, are found dead in one another's arms, the school's founders struggle to move beyond the tragedy only to be swept up in it themselves. The long, winding story of Brookhants' rise and fall is only one thread that danforth unravels throughout her adult debut. The novel's other major timeline takes place in contemporary Hollywood, where Harper Harper, the "indie-film-darling turned celesbian-megastar-influencer," sets out to produce her first film, a horror flick about Brookhants and its doomed teen lovers. Joining Harper on set are ingenue Audrey Wells, daughter of slasher film royalty, and Merritt Emmons, a wunderkind novelist whose first book inspired the film. The novel switchbacks between past and present, examining the sophisticated subculture of upper-crust Victorian-era lesbians and the Insta-fueled fame of queer icons in contemporary Hollywood. The novel's strength lies in its quiet insistence that queer women have always existed, that their lives deserve bigger, messier containers—even metafictional ones about a horror flick based on a novel based on a true story. Although danforth doggedly pursues the novel's structure over more than 600 pages, the pacing occasionally drags heavy as layers of Victorian silk. Even so, the novel manages to feel like a confection—surprising and honey-sweet on the tongue, to be savored even as it spooks.
Creepy, meta, and a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294285-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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