A provocative, quietly foreboding examination of the teen idol industrial machine, arriving at the perfect cultural moment.
A turn-of-the-millennium pop star recounts her disillusioning journey to the top of the charts in this self-assured debut.
In 1990 New Jersey, 10-year-old Amber Young sings Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart” at a local talent show, not realizing an agent is in the audience—or that this performance will direct the trajectory of her life. She lands a spot in the girl group Cloud9, where she befriends Gwen Morris, who soon goes solo and convinces Amber she’s good enough to do the same. Separately, the two achieve quick success, and their friendship continues via voicemails sent from recording studios and tour buses around the world. Both Amber’s intimate first-person narration and Gwen’s messages reveal a worrisome loss of autonomy, their bodies becoming hypersexualized vehicles for others’ desires, power plays, and entertainment. When Amber starts touring with massively famous boy band ETA, she grows close to one of the guys, Wes Kingston, despite knowing the media is desperate to see him with Gwen. This won’t end well, which we know from the get-go; the book opens with a flash from 2002, when Amber is on the cover of Rolling Stone talking about her role in a scandalous Wes and Gwen breakup. Amber’s fame comes quickly and easily, so the tension isn’t in her pursuit of it but rather in anticipation of its consequences. Readers who lived through the Britney vs. Christina TRL era will likely feel an ambivalence similar to Amber’s own. The pop craze was fun, but at what cost? It’s never quite clear how Amber feels about the music of it all: She says singing allows her to “understand the purpose of gods,” but it takes up so little space on the page it’s easy to forget that’s what she’s famous for. Then again, maybe that confusion is the point. While memoirs from former teen stars are starting to expose behind-the-scenes exploitation and abuse, this fictionalization brings readers close through the kind of rich, immersive worldbuilding and gut-punch depth of feeling that only a masterful novelist can provide.
A provocative, quietly foreboding examination of the teen idol industrial machine, arriving at the perfect cultural moment.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781250333469
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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