A smoldering story of entrapment and escape.
A skater-turned-photographer descends into the Phoenix party scene in Duffy’s literary novel.
Riley never meant to be a photographer; he was a professional skateboarder until a bad landing put him in a coma. When he woke up, his job on the tour was gone, and now he feels dizzy whenever he tries to get back on a board. Eventually, he settles for becoming a Phoenix-based skate photographer instead. From shooting skaters, he moves to parties, where he becomes the unofficial candid nightlife photographer of a beautiful model called Ashli Rose. After that, his career takes off. “Riley, the photo guy,” he narrates. “Ashli’s photo guy. My name loosely strung to hers a passport to every party, a seat at every table, a bottle or a can or a rolled up twenty passed my way. Head nods and hugs and so many smiles when I entered a room whether I was pointing my lens or not.” It’s a scene in which nobody is interested in feeling their emotions, which is just fine for Riley, who blunders from one bed or bender to the next without much thought as to why he is doing it. By the time the party lifestyle starts to catch up with his new friends—who begin dropping dead with alarming frequency—it may be too late for Riley to find his way back to normal life. Duffy has a talent for sketching the brilliant desert landscape of Phoenix and its surroundings, both geographically and psychologically. “Light for light’s sake,” the Chicago-born Riley says of Christmas-bulb-strung palm trunks. “To illuminate our path to the next booth or barstool. Meaningless here where years didn’t end, but simply reset. Where time folded in on itself, and as the calendar turned, we celebrated with debaucherous parties.” The novel’s characters and their plots never quite achieve the level of pathos that the book’s language and themes are so clearly calibrated to evoke, but fans of a certain tradition of masculine literary fiction will find in Riley a kindred damaged spirit.
A smoldering story of entrapment and escape.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798218456955
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Picket Fire
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
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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