Using upbeat escapism, Uptmor confounds expectations to expose the darker realities of American life.
Set in 2008, against the backdrop of Barack Obama’s election and California’s anti-same-sex marriage referendum, Uptmor’s ambitious first novel renders the dangers of divisiveness, rigidity, and lack of communication through the experiences of two married couples who could not be less alike.
Rachel, a feminist scholar, and Emma, an aspiring novelist, have recently gotten married and moved from Chicago to Riverbend, Indiana. Despite the affectionate solicitude they share, unspoken resentments and secrets simmer under the surface of their relationship. Recovering from a miscarriage, Emma hides her pain and her desire to try IVF again from Rachel. Both women tread carefully around Rachel’s career success: Not only has she received a tenure-track professorship at Boon University while Emma has been offered only a lowly adjunct teaching job; Rachel has also recently published and received great acclaim for an SF novel she knocked out as a lark, while Emma has yet to publish more than the occasional short story. Now socially adept Rachel remains politely oblivious as self-doubting introvert Emma suffers culture shock in their new neighborhood. She spars with her neighbor Patty, who’s a Republican and makes passive-aggressive remarks about same-sex marriage, when she finds her trespassing to tend lilacs planted by the former owners of Rachel and Emma’s newly purchased house. The ensuing conflicts seem familiar, even ho-hum, until suddenly the plot goes charmingly off the rails when it turns out that those former owners, Charlotte and Dirk Dennison, are living undetected in the hidden attic above the attached garage. Resentful that they were scammed into having their home foreclosed, Charlotte has no qualms about using the bathroom and kitchen while Rachel and Emma are at work and goes into poltergeist mode to make their lives uncomfortable. Moments of high comedy and real pathos ensue. Whether the issue is academia, marriage, or parenthood, no one is entirely in the wrong or in the right, neither the narrow-minded urban progressives nor the narrow-minded small-town conservatives.
Using upbeat escapism, Uptmor confounds expectations to expose the darker realities of American life.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316602211
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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
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