A scintillating modern love story that will leave a lasting impression.
In Pitsirilos’ novel, a young woman navigates love and loss in a near-future world.
As an intelligence assistant who analyzes sexual behaviors across New York City, Alita Melusine knows that love is an afterthought in the modern age. Yet she can’t help but yearn for an all-consuming love of her own, and she thinks she’s finally found it with Kaveh Shamez—that is, until she meets his mother, Claire, whose immediate disapproval and possessiveness strain their relationship. As tensions rise between Claire and Alita, however, Kaveh refuses to intervene, leading the younger woman to ruminate on the well-intentioned (though often misguided) advice she’d so often relied on from her late friend, Jean. Still reeling from Jean’s sudden death, she reflects on memories of sailing through the Greek islands together with him, all the while wondering what he would say of her current situation. Meanwhile, the narrative slowly reveals Claire’s perspective through interspersed snippets that reveal a complex psyche, shaped by a preoccupation with comic books and disappointment over the rejection of her astrophysics thesis, among other unhealed wounds: “My thesis was rejected on account of my theory of Venus’s alien civilization. My father…blamed the comic books as fueling such fantasy.” At the novel’s core is a meditation on how to love like Venus: For Alita, it is a desire to be idolized, and, for Claire, a volatile response to suppressed pain that she struggles to conceal. Pitsirilos has crafted a compelling exploration of what it means to be human, weaving together themes of artificial intelligence, environmental degradation, mother-son relationships, and the difficulty of modern love. Although the narrative can feel momentarily disorienting at first, its structure clarifies as it unfolds, moving fluidly between timelines and perspectives in a way that will ultimately reward engaged readers. Alita and Claire, in particular, stand out as fully realized characters with richly imagined backstories and psyches to guide their emotional arcs. The vivid prose further immerses readers in Alita’s story as she describes a heavily polluted Aegean Sea or Claire’s haunting personification of Venus.
A scintillating modern love story that will leave a lasting impression.Pub Date: March 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781958077115
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Janus Point Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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