Filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion.
Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a husband and wife are afraid to share their deepest longings and regrets.
Debut novelist Feng writes within the context of two Chinese concepts: yuanfen and zaohua. As explained in a chapter called “The Improviser’s Guide to Untranslatable Words,” yuanfen concerns the relationship between two people “brought together in ways large or small, for a few minutes or for decades,” while zaohua encapsulates the insignificance of the individual in “the makings and transmutations” of a world “indifferent to human pain.” When Cassia and Momo meet in 1973, they both avoid sharing the yuanfen experiences that have already deeply marked them. While an engineering student in Beijing in the '60s, Momo was deeply influenced by a young violinist. Dawn—who goes on to follow her unforeseeable trajectory in a parallel subplot—introduced Momo to music. Although his commitment to proletariat ideals at the time conflicted with Dawn’s commitment to art, music will remain crucial to him in ways he can’t explain to Cassia. Meanwhile, Cassia’s belief in yuanfen and zaohua has been sharpened by a trauma she is too ashamed to share with Momo: When she was 23, she witnessed the gruesome death of the young man she loved when he fell from a fifth story window while being interrogated by revolutionary vanguard members. Based on their pasts, Cassia and Momo react differently to their daughter Junie, who was born without legs beneath her knees. Ever optimistic Momo dotes on Junie while pessimistic Cassia’s love is tinged with guilt and a sense of zaohua. Momo goes to America for grad school in 1981, and Cassia follows several years later, leaving Junie with her paternal grandparents, who give her the nurturing Cassia knows she can’t. With disarmingly quiet prose, Feng digs beneath Cassia’s and Momo’s reluctance to mine their emotional depths as they struggle to grasp their individual experiences as well as their fractured relationship.
Filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982129-39-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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