Capable of such a telling line as "the bedroom looked like a bedroom in a consoling children's story," Colwin surely will...
Can you make an adult novel out of four pretty, happy, rich, smart, rather sweet, and thoroughly two-dimensional Manhattan characters?
The answer is yes, sort of, if you adopt the knowing, slightly smug comic tone that one finds in New Yorker cartoon captions. Colwin, whose previous fiction (Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object) juggled stylistic sophistication with women's-magazine sentimentality, here abandons the heart-on-sleeve for the tongue-in-chic, setting off echoes—some engaging, some just coy—of such disparate romance-watchers as Dorothy Parker, Hollywood in the Thirties, and, most disarmingly, P. G. Wodehouse. She alternates between two romances—the happy marriage of Guido and Holly and the pseudo-harrowing courtship of Misty Berkowitz by Vincent Cardworthy (Guido's cousin). These folks have what you'd have to call minor-league problems. Very romantic Guido (who oversees the family arts foundation) has to learn to accept that picture-perfect Holly sometimes needs to go off and be alone; she's afraid of getting too used to everything being so wonderful. Even more romantic Vincent (who is the Board of Planning's expert on garbage) has to cut through language-expert Misty's Jew-among-Gentiles hang-up and her anti-romantic, serf-protective (and rather tedious) snarlings. Through most of the problematic festivities—Misty's jealousy, Holly's pregnancy—it's a pleasurable relief to find the business of contemporary relationships being tossed around so blithely and reaching such cheerful resolutions. And there are a slew of funny lines ("Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed") and near-cartoon supporting players to juice things up. But eventually we don't feel that the theme ("Our trouble is that we don't know how things are supposed to be any more") has been dealt with—or, more important, that we really know any of these ultimately somewhat annoying people.
Capable of such a telling line as "the bedroom looked like a bedroom in a consoling children's story," Colwin surely will produce a story that stays in the mind; this edgy, expert entertainment seems to be trying to leave something behind, but it all rolls merrily right by without a trace.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1978
ISBN: 0-307-47440-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2021
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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: tomorrow
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