An earnest riff on evergreen themes of love, money, and betrayal.
A pair of juvenile delinquents engineer a global wellness scam.
None dare call it a Trump story, but Frumkin's second novel—following The Comedown (2018)—is plainly concerned with how a transparent grifter can siphon millions out of people with little more than empty promises and a modicum of charisma. As the story opens, the narrator, Ezra Green, is 17 and stuck at a reform camp for selling a blend of salt and Sudafed as a street drug. There, he meets Orson Ortman, a handsome huckster with bigger ambitions. Launching various grifts (fake high-fashion T-shirts, conning expensive recording gear out of a trust-fund brat), a romance soon blooms between them, culminating in a company called NuLife, which promises bliss through little more than some magnetized headgear and temple massaging. Remarkably quickly they launch a spendy retreat called the Farm and expand into a politically wobbly South American country. Orson’s ego balloons as Hollywood celebrities and the Dalai Lama arrive at the Farm, and a jealous Ezra is determined to regain his affections; but when the only way you know to express your love is deceit, a stable relationship is hard to come by. Frumkin uses NuLife as an entertaining launchpad for a satire of Scientology-style cults, wellness bunkum, and cutthroat capitalism. (An Elon Musk–like billionaire tech mogul builds some dubious technology around NuLife.) Unlike The Comedown, an impressively rangy, big-picture novel, this one is narrower and more conventional. The simplicity exposes some hard-to-buy plot turns—Ezra becomes inexplicably reckless at times, and the business world is overly credulous of Orson. (Plus, Ezra’s ever growing glaucoma is metaphorically on-the-nose.) The novel’s greatest strength isn’t its analysis of American-made frauds but as a love story, ending with a plot twist that’s at once witty and wrenching.
An earnest riff on evergreen themes of love, money, and betrayal.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781982189730
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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