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.

Publishers Weekly
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Jackson (Pineapple Street) serves up an enjoyable tale of a writer who makes new friends and then steals their stories. Caroline Lash, the 28-year-old daughter of a famous author, chafes at the idea that she’s a nepo baby. After she sells a story to the New Yorker, she quits her mid-level publishing job and leaves New York City for an 18-month fellowship in coastal Greenhead, Mass. Traveling there by train, she has a meet cute with environmental scientist Van Whittaker, a Greenhead local, who gives her napkins after she gets a jelly donut all over her white jeans. They meet again in Greenhead, and he invites her into his circle of high school friends, including his ex-girlfriend, Bailey. Not long after Caroline and Van begin hooking up, Bailey announces she’s pregnant with Van’s child. As Caroline tries to figure out how she feels about the news and navigate her place in the tight-knit group, which she’s already come to treasure, Jackson weaves in chapters focused on Bailey and the others, showing the story from their points of view. Further complicating the truth is Caroline’s thinly veiled novel in progress about Greenhead and her new friends, which heightens their interpersonal drama. Jackson has a knack for local color and well-rounded character work, as she gradually picks apart Caroline’s “ingrained snobbishness” about “life outside the city.”This has plenty of heart. (June)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Caroline Lash, daughter of an incredibly successful and famous author, is seeking to carve her own authorial path. Granted a writing fellowship in the coastal town of Greenhead, MA, she quickly falls for earnest local Van Whittaker. Van is part of a tight-knit group of friends who have known each other for decades (and have the in-jokes and traditions to prove it). Caroline feels like an outsider, which is only magnified when Bailey, Van’s high-school girlfriend and sometime hook-up, learns she’s pregnant with Van’s baby. Using the perspectives of four women—Caroline, Bailey, Augusta, and Fran—Jackson paints a nuanced, empathetic, distinct picture of each woman, exploring different views on marriage, parenthood, career aspirations, and adulthood. The titular “shampoo effect” refers to how a second application of shampoo always produces more lather than the first and similarly, all of the interactions among these friends are built on years of shared history, misunderstandings, and love. When Caroline draws writing inspiration from real life, long-held secrets burst forth to dramatic effect. This astutely observed story is funny and gossipy without veering into the mean-spirited. Hand this to readers who love Emma Straub, Amy Poeppel, and Katherine Heiny. HIGH-DEMAND