With comic energy and wild plot twists to spare, a thoroughly charming debut.
The problems of a very modern family in a slightly surreal world.
Meet the Flynns. With their marriage on the rocks, Catherine and Bud don’t have much time or energy to supervise their three daughters: beautiful, uncooperative Abigail, in love with a young man known as War Crimes Wes; brilliant, deranged Harper, who speaks seven languages but is suspended from school more often than not; between them, Louise, a classic middle child, to whom nobody is paying attention as she gets herself in serious trouble in an online chat room. Cash’s debut novel has fun with everything it touches, rocketing through the points of view of the family members and other townspeople, delighting in wordplay and absurd details. Introduced early on is a gnat problem—gnats have infested the church of Our Lady of Suffering as well as a sculpture on the town green, and they have also infested every word in the text that has the syllable “nat”—extermignate, gnatural, dognate, siggnature, and so forth. Though the town itself is never named, its principal feature, Alabaster Harbor™, is always trademarked: “Bud was the accounts and systems manager at Alabaster Harbor™—not some backwater artery of commerce but the primary port for the entire western coastline, the premier gateway for domestic and intergnational trade.” Corruption at the harbor is one of many storylines; another follows Bud’s attempt to find solace for his wife’s disdain by joining a support group called Lost Lambs, based at Our Lady of Suffering and run by the cheerful Miss Winkle. Also based at the church is Father Andrew, whose background is not in theology but in French cinema: “Father Andrew loved the world of French film, where a girl’s sexuality gave her agency, where there were fewer restrictions and more topless chain-smoking on the beach.” Between the crowd of quirky characters and drastic situations, the high-flying sentences and prose style, and Cash’s relentless joke-cracking, the novel is, like Harper, almost too clever for its own good—but the Flynns stay just real enough to win our hearts.
With comic energy and wild plot twists to spare, a thoroughly charming debut.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374619237
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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