Distinctly drawn characters make the book readable, but it lacks the ambiguity and intensity of really good gothics.
From the author of Dietland (2015), a 1950s gothic, complete with a haunted mansion, a controlling older man, a bevy of dying girls, and a heroine who escapes.
Sylvia Wren, a rich and famous painter, has a secret: She’s actually Iris Chapel, heiress to the Chapel Firearms fortune, who escaped as her father was driving her to a psych ward 60 years earlier. When a journalist threatens to reveal her identity, Sylvia decides to take control of her own narrative by writing a memoir (this novel). Iris is the fifth of the six tragic Chapel sisters, born in the 1930s, all named for flowers, about whom the village children make up a rhyme: “The Chapel sisters: / first they get married / then they get buried.” The girls grow up in a gloomy Connecticut mansion nicknamed the wedding cake with a stern, traditional father and a cold mother, Belinda, who believes she’s haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Chapel guns. Their maternal grandmother, Rose, and Rose’s mother died in childbirth, traumas that echo down the generations in the form of an apparent curse. Again and again Belinda smells roses and announces that something terrible is going to happen—and soon after, it does. Typically, the “something terrible” takes the form of a Chapel sister having sex with a man for the first time, then shrieking, laughing, smashing a window, and dropping dead. Although this novel skips from the 1950s to the 2010s without engaging with the feminist movement of the 20th century that made freedom possible for artists like Sylvia, Walker makes it clear—through heavy-handed symbols and explicit thematic statements—that she considers this a feminist story. “I’ve finally come to realize that it’s my destiny to be one of the madwomen. One of the women who speaks the truth no matter how terrifying it might be. One of the women who stands apart from the crowd,” Sylvia writes. She escapes her sisters’ fate by never having sex with a man (she’s a lesbian), by running away to New Mexico, by becoming an artist famous for vulvar flower paintings that sell for “an obscene amount of money.” (“In the world of The Cherry Robbers, Georgia O’Keeffe does not exist, and Sylvia Wren occupies (some of) that space,” Walker writes in an author’s note.)
Distinctly drawn characters make the book readable, but it lacks the ambiguity and intensity of really good gothics.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-25187-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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: today
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