A richly drawn portrait of racial injustice in an earlier era.
A literary novel shows how the killing of a Black man by a mob in 1947 shapes the lives of four people.
The lynching of 24-year-old Willie Earle has sent a rippling effect through Greenville, South Carolina. Lee Trammell was a member of the mob that did it—taxi cab drivers all—believing that they were avenging the murder of one of their own. Lee is put on trial with the rest of the men responsible, but his ultimate guilt and punishment will not be decided by any court. Alma Stone knew Willie when he was a child, though they haven’t been close for a long time. Willie’s death is the final straw that convinces her to leave the South for Harlem, where she hopes things are different for Black people. Alma is the maid of Lawton Chastain, the lawyer tasked with prosecuting the lynching case. Lawton now realizes he made a mistake marrying his wife, Lydia, instead of running off with a man he loved long ago. Lawton’s daughter, Betsy, is in high school when the trial begins, but she’s haunted by it long after. She, too, considers an escape to New York City. Even years after the verdict, Willie’s death continues to challenge the various survivors to plot escapes from the prisons of their circumstances. Alden’s prose is lyrical and immersive, particularly Lee’s sections, written in the first person: “I went on over to the Yellow Cab office. I checked my time sheets with Bill Shockley, and he said to me, ‘Let the law handle it. You’re going to get yourself in a peck a’ trouble.’ I told him you can’t stop no flood. When I come on outside, there was maybe ten or twelve cabs there, not just Yellow but Blue Bird and American.” Readers will wish at times that the author had chosen less sympathetic characters to explore—the lone villain, Lee, is consumed with redemptive guilt. But there are many things to admire about the tale’s unpredictable structure, deep characterization, and the combination of audacity and humility with which Alden approaches her subject. Less a novel about racism than a book about people thinking about racism, it manages to embody many concerns of the current zeitgeist.
A richly drawn portrait of racial injustice in an earlier era.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-98-851892-6
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Radiator Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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