An earnest exploration of toxic fandom and coming of age.
A rudderless first-year college student becomes obsessed with a new boy band.
Minnie Yang is excited to start attending the University of Texas at Austin. She struggles with her identity, having immigrated from China as a young child and grown up in predominantly white Colorado Springs, and she hopes that in college she will finally flourish: “Here, most importantly, was where she could reclaim her bright heart.” It’s 2014, and a new music sensation is emerging: HOURglass, a four-member group designed to have “the heart of Western boy bands and the training of Korean pop.” (Three of the band’s members are of Asian descent, while one is white.) Eason Chen, stage name Halo, is less formally trained than his counterparts and assigned the role of “bad boy.” Also, he has several dark secrets about his complicated family that he desperately wants to hide. Following a performance at a music festival, the band is catapulted to extreme fame, complete with highly controlling management and leagues of adoring fans. As Minnie flounders in college, navigating a messy relationship with a belittling older student and reeling from a destabilizing sexual assault, she becomes increasingly engrossed in HOURglass, especially Halo, finding in the fandom solace and a substitute for community she hasn’t found in real life. As the band’s fame grows, threatening the members’ health and friendships and Eason’s tightly kept, ruinous secrets, Minnie inches further into their orbit. Zhang writes about obsessive fandom with the knowledge of an insider, tossing in heaps of scandals and fandom minutiae (eating disorders! drug use! slash fiction! intense blog posts! manufactured fake-dating rumors about two band members!) that any boy-band or K-pop fan, especially ones who’ve been around since the book’s era, will recognize as more than plausible. Some of the prose comes off as stilted and oddly formal, and some side characters could have been more developed beyond tropes, but it’s affecting to witness Minnie’s and Eason’s hard-fought journeys to self-acceptance.
An earnest exploration of toxic fandom and coming of age.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250369666
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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