Next book

OUR BEST INTENTIONS

A powerful, story-driven exploration of some of today’s most pressing social issues.

Coming-of-age drama meets suburban thriller in a debut novel driven by the question: What happens when people’s best intentions threaten to cause more harm than good?

Angela Singh wrestles with the typical teenage travails: worrying over the distance growing between her and her best friend, Sam McCleary; managing an unrequited crush on Sam's brother, Henry; training to stay competitive on the swim team; and navigating an often fraught relationship with her single dad, who’s been raising her on his own since she was 6. However, her world is turned upside down when, walking home from swim practice one day, she finds Henry on the football field, having been stabbed in the abdomen. The affluent town of Kitchewan, New York, becomes enmeshed in a web of social politics, gossip, and backroom power plays as everyone attempts to defend their innocence. Or perhaps the incident merely uncovers the racial and economic tensions that always existed in the town, especially as Chiara Thompkins, a Black teenager, emerges at the center of the drama. Angela, whose memory of finding Henry remains blurry, must navigate her torn loyalties to her family and friends, self-preservation, and her sense of justice as she grows more deeply entangled in the community’s investigation into what exactly happened that day at the school. Rotating among multiple perspectives and moving backward and forward in time, the novel intertwines teenage drama with an incisive intersectional exploration of the complexities of intergenerational immigrant families, class, and racism. Jain tackles the novel’s themes effectively and subtly for the most part, especially in the beginning. The final chapters seem rushed, diluting the complexity and drama that made the first two-thirds so riveting and resulting in a too-tidy ending.

A powerful, story-driven exploration of some of today’s most pressing social issues.

Pub Date: March 14, 2023

ISBN: 9780063278783

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 248


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 248


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2024


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE GOD OF THE WOODS

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2024


  • New York Times Bestseller

Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.

One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.

"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.

Pub Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780593418918

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024

Close Quickview