An engaging cautionary tale about social media’s toxic inventions.
This debut novella offers a scathing indictment of those who take the fantasies of social media too seriously.
At the center of this prescient tale of deadly catfishing is Angela Fox, a sexy, blond bombshell and social media influencer who has millions of followers. There’s only one problem: Angela isn’t real. She was created by Sebastian Shafer in a desperate attempt to land a sales job at an exclusive car dealership. Using a plastic surgeon’s “after” picture of his wife, fading actor Liz Shafer, Sebastian sets up a Myface profile for Angela. Angela’s popularity soars when she’s chosen “Hottest Myface User of the Month.” Then an angry Liz hijacks Angela’s profile, changing the password and locking out Sebastian. One of Angela’s ardent followers is Norman Jarrett, a has-been child actor who livestreams his life 24/7 in a vain attempt to remain relevant. Liz as Angela decides to use Norman to eliminate obstacles in her life, starting with killing Amir Siddig, the director of a play that’s meant to be her comeback vehicle. The obvious suspect is Amir’s innocent wife, Jada, who can’t mount a sufficient defense. Sebastian still wants to cash in on Angela’s fame, so Liz aims Norman at him. But a pair of detectives wants to interview Angela, so it may be time for her to die as well. Bravo to Landt for casting blame on those living vicariously through social media celebrities and the nefarious people taking advantage of followers seeking to escape their humdrum lives. Still, it’s naïve to believe that safeguards on social media sites would prevent an Angela from existing. The author preaches a smart sermon of caution in this novella. But while Landt has a worthwhile message, he lacks sympathetic characters. The closest to likable is Max, the perjuring, closeted gay videographer who captures Norman’s life for the masses. The rest seem more than content to swim in the social media cesspool. The author seems to be imploring the audience to do better than these players and to step back into reality occasionally. This engrossing book may manage to get readers to ignore Facebook and Twitter—at least for a time.
An engaging cautionary tale about social media’s toxic inventions.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73529-810-8
Page Count: 121
Publisher: Ripland Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
