An angst-filled love story about the value of growth and understanding.
A comedian and a musician just might be a perfect match, if only they can get the timing right.
Jess Henson meets Tom Delaney when he literally runs into her, knocking her to the ground outside an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh. She’s an up-and-coming comedian who dreams of having her big break, while he’s in a band that hopes to find success. Despite their movieworthy meet-cute, Tom runs off, squashing any hope for a romance. They meet again when they’re both featured at an artist showcase. They each have their own problems—Jess has a distrust of most people because her dad split when she was a kid, while Tom has severe anxiety that causes him to say the wrong things, self-medicate with alcohol, and even make up a fake girlfriend so his band mates won’t think he’s pathetic—but despite their communication problems, they feel a connection and spend a perfect evening together. That is, until they get jumped by some drunk football fans and Tom ends up in the hospital. Jess comes along, but then Tom’s best friend shows up and mentions Tom’s (fake) girlfriend. Tom is too doped up on painkillers to set the record straight, and Jess leaves, thus beginning a yearslong string of near misses and almost-kisses for Jess and Tom. Each time they reconnect, there’s something in the way—Jess’ bitterness, Tom’s anxiety, one of them seeing someone else. As their careers take off, they both have to figure out exactly what success means for them—and whether it involves each other. Nicholls writes with warmth and humor, giving Jess and Tom fully developed lives, friends, and families. It’s satisfying to watch them grow over the years, though the personal failings that keep them apart can be frustrating to read as their would-be relationship stalls again and again. Nicholls isn’t afraid to let Tom and Jess get mean and deal with personal tragedy (such as Tom’s musician grandfather’s death, Tom’s alcoholism and anxiety, and Jess’ relationship with her absent father), giving the story a realism that anchors the lighter aspects of their romance.
An angst-filled love story about the value of growth and understanding.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984826-89-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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