A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.
Leading Lady or Final Girl? That’s the question in this delightful debut.
Film student Jamie Prescott is struggling with her dissertation—titled “All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries”—when her roommate and BFF, Laurie Hamilton, insists that she take a break and get ready for the singles event they’re supposed to attend. Jamie doesn’t expect she’ll meet the man of her dreams while speed dating at a club in Bed-Stuy, but she does her hair, spends some time choosing a good dress, and puts on a pair of heels, anyway. She really doesn’t expect she’ll spend the evening trapped in a locked-room murder mystery in which a knife-wielding psycho is picking off hopeful singles one by one. If she had, she probably would have chosen more sensible shoes. And maybe a dress with pockets. As the resident expert on horror tropes, Jamie serves as advisor to a dwindling company of surviving speed daters, while the coolheaded and obnoxiously good-looking (of course) Wes serves as leader. As the night progresses, though, Jamie starts to wonder if she’s working with the wrong tropes. What if this killer’s bloody spree is inspired by, say, Lloyd Dobler with the boombox, not Ghostface with the hunting knife (or Jason Voorhees with the machete, or Michael Myers with the kitchen knife, or Freddy Krueger with those knife fingers)? Jamie likes to call her more cerebral, less emotive bestie an “elitist piece of shit,” and Jamie’s creator is, herself, engaging in some fancy metatextual shenanigans here, but Thompson wears her smartypants well. She clearly understands not just the demands of genre but also its pleasures. Those who are familiar with romance and/or horror will have some guesses about how this narrative is going to turn out, but Thompson does an admirable job of keeping the reader guessing—and second-guessing—right up until the end.
A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668206713
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Come for the action, leave deeply moved by the fiercely beautiful meditations on maternal love.
How far would a mother go to save her daughter?
Simone Seaborn leaves her home in London for southwest Texas to meet her teenage daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer there before starting college. The two have planned a camping trip as a reunion after the longest period they’ve ever spent apart. But almost immediately, the trip seems cursed: Simone’s suitcase is lost—maybe even “on the moon,” according to an airport attendant. She and Lucy are reunited at their Airbnb stopover, only for Simone to wake in the morning and find Lucy missing. Left behind: a phone that begins to ring, “Caller Unknown.” Lucy has been kidnapped. Simone immediately snaps into action, following all the kidnapper’s instructions, including not to notify the police, a decision that her husband, Damien, strongly opposes. She travels to the meeting place only to be sent across the border to Mexico, where she must pick up a package and bring it back to Texas. Simone and Lucy are eventually reunited, but by then things have gone very wrong: Simone shoots the messenger who brings Lucy to the meetup, and then Lucy accidentally shoots an off-duty cop who’s coming to investigate the noise. On the run in the rural Texas desert, mother and daughter strike out to save each other and to clear their names. The plot is convoluted, and even a little absurd, but it keeps you guessing. What truly shines through in McAllister’s fluid prose, though, is the love. This is a novel about motherhood, and mothers and daughters, and the transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s about sacrifice and loss, but also joy, and the tenuous beauty of each moment of life. It’s about saving the day in even the direst of circumstances, and how love between a parent and child is never a loan, but exists forever—past, present, and future—even as time inevitably slips by.
Come for the action, leave deeply moved by the fiercely beautiful meditations on maternal love.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063338470
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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