Nails the emotional contradictions, absurdities, and cathartic surprises of modern life.
After a daredevil’s death shocks his circle, his best friend goes on an audacious quest for meaning.
Joan Didion called the aftermath of her husband’s death “the year of magical thinking.” For Lola Treasure Gold, the year after her best friend, Alex, dies is a season of sublimated grief turned metamorphosis. Though Alex is gone, his death is a sensation—he fell seven stories trying to sail a skateboard from one roof to another, witnessed by the friend who was filming. Their tight friend group is stunned, and to add to the loss, Lola knows their friendship could have been more. These are social media–savvy free spirits in LA; Alex died doing a stunt for clout—or maybe transcendence. Experimenting with her purpose and identity, and needing income, Lola starts to branch out. She gets shoved into the limelight: Someone films, remixes, and posts her semi-serious soliloquy on what Alex’s life might mean. The video takes off, and Lola attracts a growing fan base. She gets the hang of living larger online and, through a hero’s journey of adulation and cancellation, travels the path from ironic pseudo-guru in a sea of charlatans (“I’d just flown back from a secretive weeklong retreat intended to help scions of billionaire families understand how to live with themselves”) to someone who really does infuse people’s lives with sincerity and wonder. Chang draws characters with quick mastery, and writes Lola as a mille-feuille of sophistication, delighted lust, and self-doubt. The dialogue snaps and sparks, and Chang dispenses observations about race, class, feminism, sex, and influencer and tech-founder culture with panache. As the novel follows Lola’s search for a reason to live without Alex and a vision of who she could be on her own, it braids satire of rich people searching for their souls and a practicum on how to find closure, with both our living and our dead. Lola’s ache to know more about her Chinese family of origin, which turned her into a first-generation orphan half-raised by a landlord, is a poignant throughline as well. Despite sometimes fluffy revelations, Lola is a magnetic character who, despite her public life, has her most profound thoughts in private.
Nails the emotional contradictions, absurdities, and cathartic surprises of modern life.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780063416390
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Simply charming.
A lovable gaggle of competitive quilters attempts to defy the odds.
The ladies of the Ogden Quilters Association are gearing up for another Simpton Family Quilting Extravaganza, and this year’s nationwide competition is extra special: It’s taking place just an hour away in Smithfield, Utah. For Betty Lou Dearden, OQA’s leader and most faithful member, who never misses a Wednesday quilting night and delights in reading the bylaws, this is a dream come true—a chance to put Utah quilting on the map. But beneath her bubbly surface, Betty Lou is struggling—longtime member Leera Smeeth has been passive aggressively shooting down Betty Lou’s ideas and attacking her sense of self for years (see: a particularly biting comment about her beloved peach bathroom); her children rarely visit; and her husband’s health is declining. And to top it off, OQA is down a member since Terry Blackfoot left following the oft-referenced but never explained “needle incident.” OQA’s remaining members—flighty but lovable Lucy Jones; dependable Diane Williams and her roommate, Alice Flagstaff; and innovative Candace Braithwaite—need more support. Enter Byron Grant, a gay sewing store manager who deals in rumor and gossip as much as in thread and batting, and his best friend, shy, artistic Rob, both younger than the youngest OQA member by about 30 years. Don’t worry, there’s nothing in the bylaws expressly prohibiting men. And so this quirky group of artisans attempts to dethrone the always-winning, clearly evil Logan Quilters Society (“We don’t hate anyone!...We just don’t prefer to associate with cheaters”), all the while wrestling with interpersonal conflict, trauma, and, let’s face it, a few tacky ideas. The plot is silly and largely predictable, but McCann’s prose is bursting at the seams with humor and genuinely tender, touching moments. You’ll root for these misfits from Page 1.
Simply charming.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9798890920461
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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