BookBrowse Reviews The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead

BookBrowse:

A lively portrait of grief, sudden fame and sisterhood, The Future Saints dives into the music industry, exploring how loss is felt, performed, and survived in public.

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It's always sunny in California, to the dismay of the Future Saints' lead singer Hannah Cortland, who finds the constant brightness almost insulting as she grieves Ginny, her sister, former band manager, and present ghost. After a small show, played to a crowd that barely fills the room, Hannah decides it's time to quit. But then Theo Ford appears: a new manager sent by the band's label to squeeze one last album out of them before letting them go. And his timing couldn't be better, because the last song Hannah performs that night, a new single that channels her grief and pain, catapults the band into a level of fame previously unknown to them.

Ashley Winstead, celebrated for her thrillers and romance novels, dives for the first time into literary fiction with The Future Saints, a novel that has already been compared to the global sensation Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The similarities are there: both follow the tumultuous history of a band, its internal dynamics and struggles with substance abuse, and the behind-the-scenes machinery of the music business. They both also rely on interviews, news excerpts, and song lyrics to build a narrative. But Winstead adds something distinctly contemporary: the role of social media. The Future Saints go from unknown to famous in a matter of days, thanks, above all, to viral videos on TikTok, a phenomenon we now see play out frequently in real life.

"There's something refreshingly old-school about them, something refreshingly uncalculated," writes a Rolling Stone journalist who spends a wild night out with the band. It's interesting that, although set in 2024, the novel fits so well within the current "2026 is the new 2016" trend, capturing nostalgia for a pre-pandemic, pre-AI world where things felt more spontaneous, more genuine, more real. An article excerpt within the novel leans into this idea: "Who better embodies this moment in time? Cortland's hit a nerve by tapping into a postpandemic zeitgeist of fatigue and unaddressed trauma ... She represents us as we are in the moment: beleaguered by pain and exhaustion, unsure if we can save ourselves, but incapable of not trying, of not making art and meaning."

That grounding in reality is one of Winstead's greatest strengths. She captures the current state of the world, and in particular the specific part of it she is most concerned with portraying: the music industry. She even mentions real shows like Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a risky but effective choice that allows her fictional world to blend seamlessly with the one we all know.

Her main weakness, perhaps, is that the novel can feel slow and repetitive. The structure falls into a loop for most of it: the band performs on a bigger stage each time, each show ending with a new unreleased song from the album they are recording, demonstrating the exponential growth of their success, while, in parallel, Hannah spirals as the world looks on. Winstead writes, "everywhere she goes, people are hungry for Hannah's pain." Still, for all its repetition, this cycle allows the author to explore grief and the way it reshapes relationships.

The dynamics are varied. Friendship is explored through Hannah and her bandmates: cool, spiritual drummer Kenny, and cocky bassist Ripper, who dreams of being the frontman. Both Hannah and Theo have unresolved conflicts with their parents. There's romance, too, between Hannah and Theo, who find in each other an understanding of shared trauma—Hannah's loss, Theo's abandonment by his father. One could argue that much of modern romance is built on trauma-sharing, and Winstead leans into that, perhaps because of her past experience with the romance genre. Some characters are simplistic, though. Roger, the label's CEO, is a cold-hearted, almost cartoonishly evil embodiment of the industry's worst impulses.

But the most compelling relationship in the novel is sisterhood—the relationship between Hannah and Ginny, who haunts (literally) the narrative.

In her grief, Hannah has made of Ginny a ghost, a presence she sees and talks to. But Ginny is none other than Hannah herself: her refusal to let go ("I'm hungry for the past in a way I'm no longer hungry for the future," says the singer), but, in a sense, also the inner compass she lost when her sister drowned at sea. Ginny is often regarded as the band´s heart, the one that brought them together and smoothed their conflicts. And it is her voice in Hannah's head that encourages her to accept her feelings towards Theo, to understand Ripper's perspective in a moment of disagreement, to recoil when she hurts herself...Hannah doesn't allow herself those feelings, wants to feel numb, but "Ginny" feels them for her. And the ghost only disappears in those brief moments when Hannah is at peace with herself, happy, unburdened: those moments when her comfort is no longer needed.

The final chapters introduce a light twist that propels the story toward an ending that, while open to interpretation, is hopeful, and turns The Future Saints from a novel about grief into a novel about loyalty: the band's loyalty to Ginny, Theo's loyalty to the band, the band's loyalty to Theo, and Hannah's and Theo's loyalty to each other.

A readable novel that would make for a strong TV adaptation (and that sometimes feels written with that in mind), The Future Saints explores universal, enduring themes while remaining firmly anchored in our current reality.

This review first ran in the February 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.