On the far side of reason, past the last aisle of logic, lies the delight of Coll’s mad, mad bookstore world.
Literary event planning goes gaga, with synesthesia, anti-vegetable protesters, and a case of gas, metaphorical and otherwise.
“Written by reclusive genius Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, Pealing the Onion is a treatise of provocative ideas and vegetable wisdom meant to help the human race Slow Down + Grow Down™ in this unprecedented moment in history.” The third in a lightly linked series of novels revolving around a bookstore in our nation’s capital, Coll’s latest features a neurodivergent narrator named Matilda, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–type character who inhabits the wings of the main event. After noting the typo in the publicity email (it’s Peeling, not Pealing) the decidedly unbookish Matilda tumbles down a rabbit hole of rutabaga research, including acquiring the ingredients for a rutabaga soup and a rutabaga still-life painting inspired by the work of Maira Kalman. That’s the way things go in this novel, driven as much by language play, whimsy, and an obsession with Kalman’s Women Holding Things as by more sober narrative concerns. These concerns, not actually all that sober, revolve around the project of holding a major literary event for Dr. Rutabaga at the Lincoln Theatre, a 1200-seat venue which will sell out as soon as the tickets go on sale, such is the frenzy around the message of the public intellectual known as the Vegetable Guy. Of no help at all will be Matilda’s new co-worker, a wildly self-absorbed woman named Sage who has a fuzzy white purse pooch named Janet (as is de rigueur in a Coll novel, the animal steals the show), but must be indulged as she is a close friend of Mrs. Bernstein, the owner of the bookstore. Though Sage is tasked with assembling the snacks for the green room, it’s Matilda who ends up with Rutabaga’s bizarre shopping list: butter (Kerrygold, unsalted); one gallon milk (Lactaid 2%); Gas-X (cherry creme) and more. MacGuffin alert! If no one can track down the Gas-X, fart jokes will surely ensue. Meanwhile, where’s Janet? Why is Rutabaga’s moderator disrobing onstage? What color is the letter O?
On the far side of reason, past the last aisle of logic, lies the delight of Coll’s mad, mad bookstore world.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781400346684
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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: tomorrow
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