At once well told and ineffably sad. Read it but keep your tissues handy.
A young man and the people he loves struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland.
On September 1, 1939, the first day the bombs fall, Reuven Berkovitz and Zelda Abramovitch are in love and dream of a life together. Reuven helps his papa, Lev, an umbrella maker in Kraków who takes great pride in his work. But soon, German soldiers occupy Poland and force Papa to hand his shop over to a non-Jew. “Suddenly,” the 17-year-old Reuven says, “Papa and I were no longer umbrella makers. We were nothing.” The vise closes quickly on Jewish society, and “within nine months, the Germans had stolen our business, belongings, and identities.” Then the Jews of Kraków are confined within heavily guarded walls while the rest of the city goes about its daily business. Reuven has one advantage: Due to his fair coloring, he can easily pass for gentile. But the two lovers are separated early on, and Reuven’s unflinching desire to find Zelda is the engine that drives this compelling and heartbreaking debut novel. Once he witnesses the murder of his family, grief becomes his “constant companion....No matter how trapped [he] felt in [his] prison of melancholy, she was the one thing worth living for.” For a while, he survives by working on a farm and pretending he’s mute. Later, he’s on a work crew assigned to smash headstones then dig up and burn decaying bodies in a Jewish cemetery so a road can be built through it. The calculated and often casual cruelty is painful to read, even for those familiar with the dark history of antisemitism and the Nazi thugocracy. Reuven’s experiences feel so immediate that we want to cry with him. Will he ever find Zelda? Will they ever emerge together on the other side of the war? Will hope finally triumph over horror? A sympathetic Catholic man speaks to Reuven of a “memory now braided, like the bread, with love and grief.” Author Lending’s great-grandfather was an umbrella maker in Warsaw in the late 1800s and served as his inspiration.
At once well told and ineffably sad. Read it but keep your tissues handy.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063413849
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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: Oct. 15, 2026
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