This easy read combines a literary rom-com with an acute portrait of midlife among millennials.
A beginning author gets in over her head, personally and professionally.
Knopf editor Jackson’s sophomore novel—after the bestselling Pineapple Street (2023)—begins with a high-flying, multiphase meet-cute. Caroline Lash, 28, is traveling to the fictional town of Greenhead, Massachusetts, where she’s been awarded an 18-month-long writer’s residency in a beach cottage, hopefully recognizing her own merits and not just the fact that she’s the daughter of Gwendolyn Lash, one of the country’s top-selling authors. Making her way to her seat on the train, she steps on a jelly doughnut, which squirts red goo straight into her crotch. Offered a napkin by a cute guy with "the vibe of someone who knew his way around a kayak," she’s embarrassed that he disappears before she can clarify the non-menstrual origins of her sanguine blotch. When she runs into him a few weeks later at the bank and has a chance to explain, she feels she’s only made things worse, until she goes out and finds a jelly doughnut on the roof of her car. Then he turns up again in her group on a historic home tour. After some flirty banter, they take matters into their own hands. Soon Caroline is quite madly in love with Van Whittaker, who comes with a close-knit lifelong friend group, a set of 30-somethings with small children. Not long after they move in together, Van’s on-again, off-again girlfriend from this group turns up pregnant, the result of a pre-Caroline encounter. She wants to keep the baby, and Van is welcome to be involved or not. Jackson rotates the point of view around the set of friends, deftly depicting the practices and pressures of modern parents, where some have schedules to decide who can take shrooms and who must remain sober enough to drive, where some have fraying connections, money troubles, and/or long kept secrets, where the best advice may come from the gay teenage babysitter. Updike fans will scent an update of that writer’s fraught suburban scandals even before the author’s note acknowledging the inspiration.
This easy read combines a literary rom-com with an acute portrait of midlife among millennials.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798217059959
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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