The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.
An unhappy interaction between a private school teacher and a difficult student inspires a decadeslong revenge scheme.
From the title out, Gordon’s 20th book aspires to be a snappy, plot-driven novel with a premise based on reality TV—a socially current, Jodi Picoult–ish type of book. Agnes Vaughan, an art teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School in New England, tries to embrace an extraordinarily miserable and universally disliked student named Heidi Stolz. But her suggestion that Heidi take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York leads to a terrible misadventure for Heidi, and her initial reaction to hearing that Heidi went to a strange man's apartment is a bit harsh: “How could you have done that?” These six words set a disastrous course for the rest of both of their lives that culminates in a big, televised shebang several decades (and hundreds of pages) later and then a bunch of additional smaller shebangs as the book keeps refusing to end. Hung on the scaffolding of this silly plot is another sort of book entirely, a deep and dilatory character study of Agnes Vaughan, both her interior life (she is obsessed with the origins of words and the way we use language) and her biography (she quits teaching, moves to Italy, becomes an art restorer, has a child, has a grandchild, moves back to the U.S., all the while suffering continually for her supposed crime against Heidi). Major philosophical digressions abound—about the love of one’s work, about the love of one’s dog, about motherhood and marriage, about the persistence of “hatred and ugliness” in the world, and much more—and some of these are quite wonderful, but they end up feeling like ballast in the unwieldy mess that is this novel. Despite all Gordon's detailed fleshing-out of the ruminative Agnes, the villainous Heidi is completely nuance-free, with a backstory of Grimm Brothers–style grimness, hateable from the heels of her stilettos to the spiky tips of her hair, from her predilection for vicious lying to her enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. (As bad as she is, her mother is even worse!) And after all this, the ending—the long awaited payback—is unsatisfying, since the truth is never confronted and Agnes is never actually exonerated for her imaginary crime.
The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-524-74922-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
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