Buoyant and funny page by page, this book nonetheless has a sad and serious heart.
Checking in on a group of college friends as they face the realities of adulthood, one party at a time.
It’s two years after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania when we meet them, running out of mixers but not cocaine as they ring in 2008 at a New Year’s Eve party at the funky Lower East Side apartment of a couple of the guys. The point of view rotates among five key players of the extended group as they explore who they’ve become and what they feel about each other now. Looks like some are headed for love, others for substance abuse, others for lucrative careers. We will watch these threads play out as we look in on them four more times: at a Cancún wedding in 2014, a Labor Day birthday party in Amagansett in 2018, a Halloween party in suburban New Jersey in 2022, and, ineluctably, a funeral in lower Manhattan in 2024. The antic high spirits of Ginder’s earlier work—the first, The People We Hate at the Wedding (2017), was truly a riot—have shaded bittersweet; this book is about the pains of aging and the ripple effect of mistakes. Not to say there aren’t still some acerbically funny lines and great set pieces. One character has rejected a suitor with early onset testicular cancer: “I can’t believe you walked away from a guy with cancer.” “Whatever, it has a treatment rate of, like, ninety-five percent.” A newly out young man discovers an obstacle to gay romance: “All they ever wanted to do was lecture him about Larry Kramer. And nothing—not coke, or Nina Guzman, or a naked Nancy Reagan—could kill a boner quite like Larry Kramer.” The fact is, aging is no fun for this crowd. Whether they become parents or don’t, whether they find love or don’t, adulthood is a narrowing of options, a hardening of patterns, more loss than gain. “If at one point there had been a thousand paths available to her, each choice she had made had slashed that figure in half, and then in half, and then in half again.” Is part of the problem that everyone is so very white and privileged, and had a thousand paths in the first place? That doesn’t come up, but one wonders.
Buoyant and funny page by page, this book nonetheless has a sad and serious heart.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781668051771
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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