ARC Review: Love, Like Apples by Jeff Zentner

I have been on ARC tours with Jeff Zentner before. I have thrust The Serpent King into people’s hands without remorse for years. I own multiple copies of it. It broke me the first time and it breaks me every time I think about recommending it, which is often. When Jeff offers a spot on an ARC tour, you say yes without reading the synopsis first, because the synopsis does not matter. What matters is that Jeff Zentner is going to do something to you and you have agreed to let him do it and you are going to thank him after. Love, Like Apples is out tomorrow and it is the most Jeff Zentner thing he has ever written. Read on for why!

Love, Like Apples

by Jeff Zentner
Published by: Grand Central Publishing
on November 3, 2026
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Growing up motherless and under the cruel eye of his alcoholic, emotionally distant father, Tiller Loomis seemed destined for a hardscrabble life. In the 1960s, the small Appalachian town of Sawyer, Tennessee offered few opportunities outside of working arduous hours on his family’s apple orchard. The one ray of light was his older brother Smith, a compassionate and gentle boy who salvages what might have otherwise been a brutal childhood. Kindness, he teaches Tiller, is a choice.
But when Smith is drafted into the Vietnam War, Tiller’s world collapses. Directionless and grief-stricken, he stumbles into a children’s puppet show at his church and ultimately finds purpose and joy through the strange, tender art of puppetry. Chasing his dream of puppeteering full time, Tiller lands in the gritty, graffitied, bohemian hothouse of 1977 New York City, where experimental artists and misfit idealists are using puppets to try to reach teens with a message of hope on a PBS show called Imagine Nation.
In Imagine Nation’s cast, Tiller finds a chosen family of dreamers and creators who will change his life forever, chief among whom is the beautiful Julie DiFrancesca, a fiercely vivacious woman who offers Tiller a chance at a life he never thought possible.
Narratively framed as a present-day documentary production about Imagine Nation, LOVE, LIKE APPLES takes us from the 1970s into the modern era, tracing how the ripples from one controversial but forgotten TV show and a complicated love affair continue outward over decades, while also exploring the indelible power of radical empathy and the lives of the artists who carry its flame in their hearts.

Review

Raise your hand if Jeff Zentner has personally victimized you. Yeah. Me too. Every single time. And yet here we are.

If you want to know what this book feels like, imagine Forrest Gump, the Jim Henson documentary, and Daisy Jones and the Six wrapped around a YA story, with queerness, grief, joy, and the radical act of making art at the absolute center of everything. That is Love, Like Apples. I was crying by 17% and writing Jeff Zentner how dare you in my notes (and to him…sorry, Jeff!) and I never recovered.

Tiller Loomis grows up in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee, motherless, under his alcoholic father’s thumb, on an apple orchard with one saving grace: his older brother Smith, who teaches him that kindness is a choice, that even little things deserve to be treated kind, and that you can always pick being good if you want. When Smith gets drafted to Vietnam and Tiller’s world collapses with him, Tiller stumbles into puppetry, finds his people in 1977 New York City, and falls into the great love of his life. The structure moves like a life does, in waves, each one carrying something forward and something lost.

What Jeff does that nobody else does the same way is refuse to separate grief from joy. Tiller is poured from a crucible of grief and still arrives at joy is how the universe tells us it favors our existence and means both things completely at the same time. The heart is a strange vessel. It can be full and broken all at once. That line stopped me cold. He gives you the joy so the grief can find you (as is evidenced reading this book). He always does this. You know he is doing it and it works every time anyway.

One of the things I highlighted and sat with longest was at Chapter 37, the observation about Tiller’s small life not containing even one real friend. The conservative conversation about male loneliness right now wants to blame women for not being available enough. Jeff is doing something else entirely. Tiller’s isolation is not a shortage of women. It is what happens when men are raised in systems that punish softness, that call kindness weakness, that draft you into wars and then frown on you for needing someone to hold. Tiller finds his way out of that loneliness through art, through community, through being exactly the kind of gentle and weird and specific person the patriarchy would have him be ashamed of. Jeff Zentner is himself that person and it shows on every page of this book.

The queerness in Love, Like Apples is handled with the kind of care that I, as a queer reader, do not always feel safe assuming. Jeff earns it. A nation that smiles upon sending boys to kill each other but stamps out any expression of boys loving each other. He writes that sentence in a book set in 1977 and it lands in 2026 like he meant it for right now, because he did. The AIDS crisis arrives in this book the way it arrived in real life, quietly and then catastrophically, and Jeff does not look away from what it meant to love someone in that moment and lose them. He does not resolve it cleanly. He sits in it. That is the queer experience he is describing: loving in a world that has decided your love is the problem, not the violence done in the name of propriety.

And then there is what he is saying about art and children and censorship. At Chapter 22, the vision for Tiller’s puppet show is described as tackling heavy material, the things teenagers face in silence and alone, discrimination and grief and addiction and suicide and mental illness. I wrote, Jeff be like what if I snuck YA in here, because that is exactly what he did. Later there is a line about teenagers having adult intelligence but less experience living in the world, which makes them like adults who still have a sense of wonder. That is his thesis and it is also an argument for why we should trust teenagers with real stories, queer stories, complicated stories, stories that do not pretend the world is clean. We do not withhold difficult material from teenagers because it will harm them. We withhold it because it might make them harder to control. Jeff has been making that argument in every book he has ever written and he makes it here again, in an adult novel that is also, unmistakably, a YA story wearing a longer coat.

By the time I got to the line about loving Julie every hour of every day since they met, I had already written I don’t like it in my notes before the sentence was even finished, because I knew. That is what reading Jeff Zentner does to you after enough books. You feel the wave coming before it breaks and you brace yourself and it wrecks you anyway. Sometimes you have to choose joy because of the darkness and not in spite of it. He gave us that and I wrote at least he gave us this, which is how I feel about the whole book.

All the stars. I do not forgive him. Who am I kidding.