An uneven but ultimately satisfying story about regret, race, and redemption.
A washed-up country singer returns to his hometown, where he’s forced to confront his first love, who also secretly wrote his biggest hit.
Luke Randall, a Black country singer, can’t face most of the people in his life. What began as a promising career has devolved into a weekly gig in a dive bar, where people come just to hear him play the one hit he’s known for, and he can’t stand it. When he’s approached by the agent of his musical idol, legendary Black country singer Jojo Lane, and invited to perform with her at an upcoming festival, he can’t afford to say no. Unfortunately, the event requires him to return to his hometown in the Arkansas Delta, where he must confront Jojo’s daughter, August, the first girl he ever loved. She’s also the one who wrote the lyrics to the song that made him famous, but he never credited her. It’s no surprise she hates him now. Luke is finally ready to return to make things right. Back in town, he’s determined to tell August truths he never shared, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Meanwhile, he’s also trying to repair his relationship with the brother he’s been estranged from for years and to forgive the mother who got everything wrong. Whether any of these wounds can be healed is unclear. The book follows Luke in a close third-person narrative, shifting periodically to August’s perspective and also alternating between two timelines: 2009, when they were in high school, and the present day in 2023. With an emotional plot that touches on childhood trauma, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and neglect, the novel also explores issues of race in country music. Luke is a frustrating protagonist, wavering between self-pity and passivity while slowly trying to earn his redemption. August fares better, but her motivations feel underexplored, especially given the emotional weight she carries. Still, there are moments of real tenderness and hard truth, particularly when the novel examines the country music industry’s treatment of Black artists. Finally, while the story’s trajectory is fairly predictable, the final chapters deliver an emotionally impactful payoff, if the reader is patient enough to get there.
An uneven but ultimately satisfying story about regret, race, and redemption.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781538767528
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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: yesterday
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