There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.
Farce meets tragedy and science meets show business in this romantic triangle featuring a student, a professor, and a chimpanzee.
There’s an antic energy to Boyle's latest which comes at the expense of character development. Aimee Villard is naïve and beautiful, a college student who recognizes how attractive she is because of her effect on men—and a certain chimpanzee. Yet she refuses to use her beauty to manipulate and thus provides this novel with its heart. She is a cliché of the innocent young coed when that term was used often and seemingly without condescension. Guy Schermerhorn is a professor who's deeply invested in researching the communicative possibilities between humankind and the simian world and who parlays that work into TV appearances. After his marriage falls apart, he falls in love, or lust, with Aimee, whom he's hired to help with his live-in chimpanzee. The chimp, named Sam, also falls in love with Aimee because of the same animal magnetism that attracts Guy. As the characters in this novel respond to animal urges and instincts, Sam emerges as the most complex. Short chapters written to capture his perspective alternate with longer ones that find his human enablers attempting to deal with whatever mischief he has made. And they alternate along different timelines, with Sam’s chapters often reflecting a near future that the humans have yet to experience. Sam can talk with sign language and understand, he responds to treats and to scolding, but he also learns to lie and scheme and manipulate, aping human behavior. As Sam and Guy compete for Aimee’s affection (which she shares with both), Aimee and Guy compete for Sam’s favor. And all of them must contend with another professor, a supervisor to whom Guy reports, who is some sort of alpha male. Or maybe God—to the animals, at least. Despite his domestication, Sam occasionally shows signs of being a wild animal. This can’t end well, and it doesn’t, as a comedy of manners takes a darker turn.
There might be a movie here, Planet of the Apes as a rom-com.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-305285-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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
Simply charming.
A lovable gaggle of competitive quilters attempts to defy the odds.
The ladies of the Ogden Quilters Association are gearing up for another Simpton Family Quilting Extravaganza, and this year’s nationwide competition is extra special: It’s taking place just an hour away in Smithfield, Utah. For Betty Lou Dearden, OQA’s leader and most faithful member, who never misses a Wednesday quilting night and delights in reading the bylaws, this is a dream come true—a chance to put Utah quilting on the map. But beneath her bubbly surface, Betty Lou is struggling—longtime member Leera Smeeth has been passive aggressively shooting down Betty Lou’s ideas and attacking her sense of self for years (see: a particularly biting comment about her beloved peach bathroom); her children rarely visit; and her husband’s health is declining. And to top it off, OQA is down a member since Terry Blackfoot left following the oft-referenced but never explained “needle incident.” OQA’s remaining members—flighty but lovable Lucy Jones; dependable Diane Williams and her roommate, Alice Flagstaff; and innovative Candace Braithwaite—need more support. Enter Byron Grant, a gay sewing store manager who deals in rumor and gossip as much as in thread and batting, and his best friend, shy, artistic Rob, both younger than the youngest OQA member by about 30 years. Don’t worry, there’s nothing in the bylaws expressly prohibiting men. And so this quirky group of artisans attempts to dethrone the always-winning, clearly evil Logan Quilters Society (“We don’t hate anyone!...We just don’t prefer to associate with cheaters”), all the while wrestling with interpersonal conflict, trauma, and, let’s face it, a few tacky ideas. The plot is silly and largely predictable, but McCann’s prose is bursting at the seams with humor and genuinely tender, touching moments. You’ll root for these misfits from Page 1.
Simply charming.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9798890920461
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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