A somewhat ridiculous novel, nicely marbled with fine food and travel writing.
A stiff, lonely young woman takes a life-changing trip to Paris.
After suffering a miserable childhood at the hands of her narcissistic mother, Stella St. Vincent is surprised to receive an envelope labeled “For My Daughter” after Celia’s death in 1983. In it is a piece of paper that says “Go to Paris”; the money to pay for the trip will only be released after it’s booked. This is just the beginning of a silly story with a wildly overcaffeinated plot and characters that are not even close to real people, foremost among them an annoying protagonist who can’t stop shooting herself in the foot even as she miraculously finds her tribe and discovers her extraordinary gifts for eating and cooking. Though she lacks the instincts of a fiction writer, Reichl fills her second novel with the high-flying writing about food, wine, places, and clothes that have made her nonfiction work a well-deserved success. In fact, according to an author’s note, this book grew out of her editor’s request that she expand a chapter from her memoir about trying on a little black dress in Paris. Unfortunately, a few too many ingredients have been added, including a search for a forgotten 19th-century woman painter; appearances by culinary figures like Marc Meneau and Jean Troisgros and literary figures like John Ashbery, James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg; a nasty Mr. Darcy–style love interest; and the search for Stella’s father, whom she either does or doesn’t want to find depending on the page. But the food writing is almost worth the price of admission, ranging from the horrific to the euphoric. Here’s Stella eating ortolans, whole baby birds: “All her senses were concentrated in her mouth as her teeth crashed down again and again. She felt the skull crackle and tasted what must be brain. It was hot, it was primitive. It was exciting.”
A somewhat ridiculous novel, nicely marbled with fine food and travel writing.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780812996302
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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: today
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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