A touching debut that delights the senses.
In Hamm’s novel, a woman discovers a secret from her mother’s past in an old cookbook.
Vene Winstonarrives at her parents’ estate to comfort her mother, Olivia, during the late stages of cancer, but the reunion is far from emotional. While Vene is close with her father, Jonathan, a successful diplomat who served under President Harry S. Truman after World War II, her relationship with her mother has always been strained. Olivia didn’t support her daughter’s choice to become a doula or her decision to end a moribund marriage when Vene met her true love, Tony. Everything Vene thinks she knows about her mother changes the day she discovers a worn cookbook dating back half a century with notes on every page. They reveal a different side of Olivia: the passionate cook with a fiery heart, the woman ready to risk her position in society for love. Something happened to her right after the war, and Vene begins her search for clues driven by a burning question: “How did this woman who knew each spice jar, who was so playful and passionate about food, become her mother? Cold. Unsentimental.” In her debut novel, the author cooks up a fascinating love story, steeped in mystery until the final pages, spiced with mouthwatering recipes from Italian cuisine, the history of the Napa region, and the details of its winemaking practices (such as storing wine in caves built by the same laborers who constructed the transcontinental railroad). The mother-daughter dynamic at the heart of the narrative remains nuanced, complicated, and not easily reconciled. Overshadowed by Olivia, Vene never quite becomes a character in her own right (her husband, Tony, and 18-year-old daughter, Dani, make only brief appearances), yet her love and compassion for her mother underly the novel’s most moving scenes, such as the moment when, discussing funeral arrangements, Vene can’t help but blurt out, “I’m going to miss you, Mom,” and Olivia quietly echoes, “I’ve missed me for a long time already.”
A touching debut that delights the senses.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425296
Page Count: 248
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: today
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