An empathetic tale that captures its time and place.
Wolter’s historical novel chronicles the life of a disabled young man in Southeast Asia.
Idris’ life changes forever in 1943 when he contracts polio as a 4-year-old; unable to walk with his twisted legs, he crawls along the dusty ground. In his small fishing village of Kuala Terengganu in Malaya, peers mock him as “Salamander Man,” and many adults also behave unkindly, believing Idris has been cursed by the evil eye. The primary school headmaster won’t let Idris attend, stating “School isn’t for his kind.” Though he’s crushed, Idris educates himself, starting with a series of English school books decommissioned during the 1940s Japanese occupation of Malaya. Idris inserts himself into the stories of Andy, Betty, and their dog Cookie as a friend who is accepted despite his nonworking legs. Learning that Idris has again been rejected by the primary school, Uncle Rashid, a secondary school teacher, offers to tutor the boy in Islamic studies, literature, and geography. Idris also acquires two more mentors: Father Chao teaches him Chinese, and an English bank manager, Mr. Chadwick, becomes a personal friend. Idris becomes fluent in several languages, reads great works of literature like The Iliad and Ulysses, and receives a life-changing gift from Mr. Chadwick, but what he yearns for most seems unreachable—friends his own age (and, as he gets older, a girlfriend). Idris’ story could easily become sentimentalized, but Wolter portrays his main character as a flawed person, not a saintly martyr. (Idris gets angry with Father Chao and God for not fixing his legs and enjoys the revenge he takes on some mean older boys; he also sits in a tree, creepily spying on undressed women.) The book provides an intriguing snapshot of Idris’ village in the country then called Malaya as villagers wearing sarongs wash outdoors, children climb trees for fun, and Idris ingests turtle eggs and goat’s milk. After the introduction of Maimum, the most beautiful woman Idris has ever seen, the story edges into melodrama, but Idris, who loves books for “transporting [him] to other times and other places,” leaves a lasting impression.
An empathetic tale that captures its time and place.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798315565819
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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