Entrancing, edgy, and melodramatic tales with a palpable bite.
This short-story collection offers an often disconcerting glimpse of America.
In “The Bitterest Winter,” Laurel reluctantly moves to Chicago, her lawyer husband’s choice for their growing family. She struggles to fit into this life that he’s created, even practicing her facial expressions in a bathroom mirror. Watts’ 15 tales sear with family drama, which tends to linger uncomfortably in dark territory. In “Dollhouse,” for example, young Deirdre only sees parts of her sickly, bed-ridden great uncle, like his feet (“two tiny tombstones”) and his glass eye in a jar. “The Hocker House” finds 13-year-old Jeff Moomah trying to convince friends in his tight-knit neighborhood that he’s spotted “weird” Mr. Hocker transporting a body in a wheelbarrow. Most of these U.S.–set tales, unfolding during various decades—from the 1960s and ’70s to the present—deliver countless nods to things distinctly American, like Disney films, Starbucks, and classic TV shows. This nostalgic touch will draw in readers, along with believable characters (for instance, a girl being irked by her incessantly abrasive grandfather, and a 40-something woman mourning the loss of her beloved twin brother years after his death). Some family members and friends are at odds, but there’s also a strong sense of unity among much of the casts. While not every story takes a drastically somber turn, they certainly don’t bask in happier moments. The book’s most chilling tale is the itch-inducing “Starscraper,” which zeroes in on Eva, who “draws” a building for the creatures she believes live under her skin—using a stolen steak knife on her thigh. Watts writes with a profound, confident voice, calling one character’s eyes the “blue color of a gas stove flame,” and observing that a Florida church’s life-sized, plastic Mary and Joseph are on their backs for “a little breather” before going on display.
Entrancing, edgy, and melodramatic tales with a palpable bite.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Devil's Party Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: yesterday
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