Bursting with flavor.
Three best friends face the end of high school with trepidation and nostalgia.
Nora isn’t ready for things to change. When senior year starts, and she can feel the cracks beginning to form in her longtime friendships with Iris and Lili, she scrambles for an activity that will keep the three connected. Her solution? Supper Club. Nora, Iris, Lili, and some other friends come together to share food, laughter, and memories. Nora, who is Italian American, makes rainbow cookies and lasagna. Lili, who is cued as being of Chinese heritage, celebrates the Lunar New Year with steamed sea bass and high school graduation with braised pork ribs and spring bao. Iris, who is White, brings in mac and cheese and her mom’s banana bread. Their other friends contribute to the cultural mélange with mofongo, challah, and flautas. Each friend weathers her own challenges—sick parents, anxiety attacks, alcohol use, and romantic pursuits gone wrong, to name a few. These bumps in the road don’t leave their friendships unscathed, but the story is ultimately reassuring. The richly colored art is full of movement and personality, gestures and facial expressions bringing intensity to every character. The text relies on dialogue for exposition, trusting readers to connect the dots and build connections between events that take place in the characters’ lives over the course of the school year.
Bursting with flavor. (recipes, concept art) (Graphic fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5343-2421-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Image Comics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
A taut yet winding mystery that will keep readers guessing.
In this thriller, a flyer on the cheer team at her small-town Texas high school is dragged back into the awful events that claimed her best friend and her boyfriend.
Senior Iris Henley was horrified when her boyfriend, Rocky Koenig, and her former best friend, Lynette Zeiger, were found dead in a presumed murder-suicide the previous school year. She and Lynette, whose drug use was spiraling out of control, had already fallen out, but Iris had no idea Rocky was cheating on her with Lynette. But when anonymous social media posts claim that Iris herself is responsible for their deaths, her life becomes a nightmare of accusations and betrayal. Employing first-person, present-tense narration that feels immediate and anxious, this mystery builds steadily over the course of 25 days during which Iris feels increasingly desperate and unsure whom she can trust. Her troubled relationships with her friends and family are multidimensional and render her a sympathetic and likable narrator, who worries about her own reliability as she was drunk and high the night of the deaths. In particular, a subplot involving Iris’ growing understanding of her younger sister, Noelle, lends emotional depth to this whodunit. The central cast is white, and surnames suggest that some members of the supporting cast are Latine, including Iris’ best friend.
A taut yet winding mystery that will keep readers guessing. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250323835
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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