Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A beginning author gets in over her head, personally and professionally. Knopf editor Jackson’s sophomore novel—after the bestsellingPineapple Street (2023)—begins with a high-flying, multiphase meet-cute. Caroline Lash, 28, is traveling to the fictional town of Greenhead, Massachusetts, where she’s been awarded an 18-month-long writer’s residency in a beach cottage, hopefully recognizing her own merits and not just the fact that she’s the daughter of Gwendolyn Lash, one of the country’s top-selling authors. Making her way to her seat on the train, she steps on a jelly doughnut, which squirts red goo straight into her crotch. Offered a napkin by a cute guy with "the vibe of someone who knew his way around a kayak," she’s embarrassed that he disappears before she can clarify the non-menstrual origins of her sanguine blotch. When she runs into him a few weeks later at the bank and has a chance to explain, she feels she’s only made things worse, until she goes out and finds a jelly doughnut on the roof of her car. Then he turns up again in her group on a historic home tour. After some flirty banter, they take matters into their own hands. Soon Caroline is quite madly in love with Van Whittaker, who comes with a close-knit lifelong friend group, a set of 30-somethings with small children. Not long after they move in together, Van’s on-again, off-again girlfriend from this group turns up pregnant, the result of a pre-Caroline encounter. She wants to keep the baby, and Van is welcome to be involved or not. Jackson rotates the point of view around the set of friends, deftly depicting the practices and pressures of modern parents, where some have schedules to decide who can take shrooms and who must remain sober enough to drive, where some have fraying connections, money troubles, and/or long kept secrets, where the best advice may come from the gay teenage babysitter. Updike fans will scent an update of that writer’s fraught suburban scandals even before the author’s note acknowledging the inspiration. This easy read combines a literary rom-com with an acute portrait of midlife among millennials. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.