A novel about the families we inherit and the ones we make for ourselves.
A sprawling, multigenerational portrait of a mixed-race family that begins with a man's quest to uncover the truth of his origins.
Jenry Castillo, a talented pianist raised by Marisa, a single mother from a family of Cuban immigrants, sets off from Miami to begin his first semester at Brown University. He's desperate to find out more about his biological father, Jasper Patterson, a famous Black ballet dancer his mother met when she studied there and who died young in a tragic accident. Soon after arriving in Providence, he meets Jasper’s relatives—his own biological grandfather, Winston, and aunt, Juliet—and the real story of his heritage proves to be more complicated than he'd imagined. With a dizzying narrative that zips from character to character and weaves between present and past, from Providence to Miami to New York to Cuba, Harper has created a novel about longing, loss, kinship, talent, queerness, and what makes a family. At its heart is the story of two young women, Marisa and Juliet, who love each other and decide to have a baby together—and all the lies and secrets and betrayals that unfurl from that choice. Juliet, the "other mother," is a complicated, fully imagined character whose warmth and charm make you root for her even as her darker angels—addiction, selfishness, a desperate need for artistic success—threaten the new life she’s built since losing contact with Jenry. The descriptive language is sharpest in these sections: Juliet, once a talented jazz pianist, describes the way windshield wipers give her a feeling of comfort, “like the metronome always used to, marking the top of her piano like an emblem marks the hood of a car.” The raw intensity of Juliet’s feelings for Jenry, the fear and desire his arrival brings into her life, and her desperation not to make the same mistakes again offer real stakes and drive the narrative forward pleasurably. Some of the sections feel less necessary. The story of Jasper is lovely but ultimately distracting from the main arc. Even Jenry’s section, the theoretical raison d'être of the novel, is sluggish and overdetermined. Twists and turns introduced in the historical sections complicate the facts of Jenry’s birth and move the plot forward without illuminating the deeper, more interesting conflicts between characters in the present—or creating space for unexpected revelations in the future.
A novel about the families we inherit and the ones we make for ourselves.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-504-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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: yesterday
BOOK REVIEW
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