A queer coming-of-adulthood tale with enough cheekiness to make growing up seem not so bad.
Eleanor Evans’ so-called Wild Year is in full swing, but her enthusiasm for doing something wild every month is waning. Perhaps creating a queer commune with a bunch of friends will add intrigue to an otherwise conventional life.
Leaving London was never part of El’s plan. Neither was falling in love with Ray, her co-worker and best friend, who looks very good in a blazer. But El is determined to make some sweeping changes in her life. So when her token straight friend, Will, lures El and Ray and their fourth pal, the flamboyant Jamie, into the country to see a house he wants to buy and renovate and proposes that they all do it together, El and the others are ready to go for it. And luckily (or perhaps torturously for El), Ray is good with tools. The group soon starts a popular home renovation Instagram account, becomes parents to a group of chickens named after Twilight characters, learns the challenges of a long commute, and joins their adopted village’s WhatsApp group to be privy to the local drama. All the while, El continues to pursue her Wild Year, though the only motivation that seems to keep her going is her affection for the otherwise occupied Ray. Predictably, though, El can’t keep her feelings to herself, and the novel’s biggest conflict resolves rather quickly. El’s wildness, or maybe her lack of wildness, has led her to take risks to gain a happy life, which is perhaps the most out-there wish any Millennial can have. Kay has a sharp eye for Millennial culture, and her humorous dialogue and fully fleshed-out characters make for a satisfying novel.
A queer coming-of-adulthood tale with enough cheekiness to make growing up seem not so bad.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593470053
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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