A thoughtful and compelling account of the responsibilities that come with privilege.
During a harsh winter, an Iraq War veteran with PTSD takes refuge in the woods surrounding a prestigious girls boarding school in this novel.
In Connecticut, 18-year-old Sylvia Bickham, who’s led a fairly sheltered existence, is due to graduate from the highly selective Miss Oliver’s School for Girls and take the next steps on a privileged but rather purposeless path. When she encounters Christopher Triplett bathing naked in the river that runs through the school grounds, it comes as something of a shock to her; for him, it’s a moment of profound humiliation. He’s a former Marine sergeant with four tours in Iraq behind him. An incident involving the death of a young girl during his service has left him unable to cope with civilian life. He’s jobless and lives in a makeshift lean-to in the forest, but as the brutal Connecticut winter draws closer, his chances of survival are diminishing rapidly. For Sylvia, its unconscionable that someone is struggling to survive on the grounds of a wealthy school, so, aided by fellow student Elizabeth Cochrane, she starts providing Christopher with food, clothing, and money. When the weather begins to turn and Christopher’s shelter is vandalized and destroyed, it becomes clear that more drastic measures are needed. Two things are guaranteed to get you expelled from Miss Oliver’s: stealing and allowing men into your dormitory—and Sylvia and Elizabeth are soon guilty of both. In this third installment of Davenport’s Miss Oliver’s series, following No Ivory Tower, he presents readers with a slow-burning, gripping novel that will reward their patience. The dilemma that Sylvia and Elizabeth face involves making the subtle but important distinction between doing the correct thing and doing the right thing, and it’s one that plays out convincingly over the course of the story. The author also handles homeless veteran Christopher’s plight with sensitivity and insight. Davenport is an accomplished stylist with a keen ear for nuanced dialogue; he also has a knack for making serious political points with a light touch that makes them broadly accessible.
A thoughtful and compelling account of the responsibilities that come with privilege.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5132-6307-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: West Margin Press
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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