A mystifying but endlessly absorbing tale blending surreality and issues of mental health.
A psychiatrist’s unorthodox methods shake up a New England mental hospital in Gregg’s lightly supernatural novel.
Dr. Patrick Denny returns to psychiatry after a successful writing career. He accepts a position at the Everston Psychiatric Hospital in Waylingbrooke, New Hampshire, and quickly turns heads—most noticeably, Patrick favors keeping patients off, or taking them off, of meds, which he believes render them “brain-dead zombie[s].” In the case of 19-year-old Samantha Perez, who’s wracked with guilt over the deaths of her long-ailing parents, Patrick gives her a 19th-century diary to read. Sam has no inkling as to how this diary will prove more effective than prescribed drugs, but it does help her overcome her guilt, as well as her insomnia, in an unexpected way. Patrick’s treatments encourage patients to face what’s troubling them, resulting in dreamlike scenes that may be all in their heads, although Patrick seems to be in them, too. Sadly, the shrink faces quite a bit of resistance. Patrick wishes to see Michael McKay, who experiences a psychotic break after claiming he’s “trapped the monster” (inspired by Patrick’s 15-year-old book The Monster), but Michael’s great aunt and legal guardian doesn’t want Patrick anywhere near her nephew. Patrick has his own personal problems to contend with; some are psychological, like the recurring dream of a cackling “old crone” threatening an expectant mother. Then there are his more commonplace miseries, such as his ex-literary agent turned not-especially-faithful girlfriend, Helen Olssen, whose latest agenda doesn’t mesh with Patrick’s.
Gregg’s story, which is intended to launch a Patrick-centric series, contains a handful of surreal moments, like Sam being “tethered” to someone with a “dreamlike cord” and Michael revisiting his past by living a scene from Patrick’s novel. Interspersed between these are signs of a more relatable Patrick as he argues with a pompous colleague from Everston or ducks into his seat at a concert while trying to avoid someone. Despite its wildly varying components, this novel is surprisingly cohesive, thanks in large part to the author’s deliberate pacing and unambiguous transitions. For example, excerpts from the old diary guide readers into the otherworldly place that Sam finds herself in, and the author makes it clear what’s happening on similar excursions (“he floated deeper and deeper into the nothingness”). The action at the hospital further grounds the narrative, as do the lively patients, including Sam and Mike; Ray Scarlatti, who’s long held a fear of death; and the complicated case of Amelia Dearborne, who has suffered violent outbursts since she was a teenager decades ago. Gregg lightly touches on the supernatural, as it’s a possible explanation for the more fantastical sequences, and rounds out the story with a probable homicide in the latter half. Many of these subplots and characters come together in an illuminating final act as Patrick resolves one of the psychiatric cases. Of course, this opening installment still leaves plenty unexplained avenues for him to explore later.
A mystifying but endlessly absorbing tale blending surreality and issues of mental health.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798992327106
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Cemetery Hill Publications
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
