Joshua Gaylord

Hummingbirds is a sly, charming novel about the students at a Manhattan girls' school and the adults who sometimes remember to teach them.  Those of us who love Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie will now have to make room next to it on our shelves for Joshua Gaylord's winning debut.

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—Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Provocative and well-written.

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—People

Especially good at characterization, Gaylord has delivered a story that's ripe with acute and wry observations on men and women, competition, sexuality, and secrets. He's created a slippery slope, but readers will find the terrain surprisingly navigable as the novel ends. Highly recommended.

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—Library Journal

The book is a languishing and lovely read about the people who spend their days in the hallowed halls of Carmine-Casey, and sometimes their evenings as well. It is also about what they do when they leave these hallowed halls. It is about friendship, gender, age, love, sex and wanting—wanting to be something different, something that is colorful and special, that all will notice and admire.

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—Bonnie Brodie, MostlyFiction Book Review

Hummingbirds positively glistens with erudition and insight. Whether writing about prep school girls or the adult men who walk among them, Gaylord's stunning writing elevates his subject matter with equal parts humanity and elegance.

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—Jonathan Tropper, author of How to Talk to a Widower

In Gaylord’s winning debut, teenage girls and their male teachers vie for power at a Manhattan prep school. The author, himself a teacher at a Manhattan prep school, is a keen observer of this privileged world. He captures [the adult] point of view in such lush language that readers might overlook his shrewd, subtle presentation of the students. A very grown-up novel about adolescence and the folly of adults, by an impressive new voice in American fiction.

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—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

If you're the kind of smart reader who likes complex . . . grown-up books where people have complicated relationships and are confronted by morally ambiguous choices, this book is a must read.

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—Heeb Magazine

Keenly plotted and psychologically acute, this novel thrums with deceptions great and small—what we don't tell each other, and what we won't admit to ourselves.

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—Ed Park, author of Personal Days

The Carmine-Casey prep school girls flutter through Gaylord's debut, but they're not alone; their teachers are insecure flirts and cheats amid divorces and trysts. . . . [T]he complicated web of loyalties, attraction, competition and camaraderie provides much tension as things play out—but not in an expected way. . . . Gaylord's tale of overeducated men and the teenage students who exhibit the finesse and understanding their teachers lack hits all the right notes.

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—Publisher's Weekly

A Nabokovian Gossip Girl that is refreshingly smart in how it is less about the labels and more about the lust exhibited by students and teachers. . . . There are male authors who write such believable female characters and conversations that you know they must have some female friend informing the editing process. . . . What’s even more impressive about Gaylord’s female insights is that they are mostly about teenaged females, an even more elusive breed. . . . Hummingbirds entertains with an intellectual edge that will surely satisfy the educated reader wanting some fun.

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—Connie White, The Dartmouth