A coming-of-age novel focused on its endearing narrator’s introspection rather than typical teenage drama.
Set in Boston, Roamer’s third installment in a series stars a gentle, queer teenager who’s full of questions.
Picking up after the first two books, Why Can’t Life Be Like Pizza (2020) and Why Can’t Freshman Summer Be Like Pizza (2020), Roamer continues to follow his 15-year-old narrator, RV, into his sophomore year at the prestigious Boston Latin School. Everything in RV’s life seems uneasy at the moment. He’s no longer in the class of his mentor, Mr. Aniso. His best friend Carole is too wrapped up in her crush on a French boy to pay him much attention. His parents’ fights are only getting worse. And, most troubling of all, his friendship with Bobby—the handsome African American jock with whom he shared his first same-sex kiss—has not been the same since Bobby joined varsity football. To cope, RV drowns his teenage sorrows in cheese slices at Joe’s Pizza, his local haunt. He also strikes up a new friendship with Mark, a born-again Christian who first seems only interested in ogling their exotic Spanish teacher, Señorita Sánchez, but slowly reveals surprising depth. RV continues to grapple with his sexuality as LGBTQ+ issues come up around him at home, at school, and in the news, but his exact feelings on whether he’s really gay and how that fits with his Catholic upbringing remain elusive. Roamer’s characters tend to speak a little too earnestly for believable modern-day teenagers. (“Knowing you’re cheering for me will give me even more motivation,” Bobby says stiffly, without any sense of irony or flirtation at one point.) However, RV’s inner monologue feels fluid and endearingly neurotic, and Roamer excels at narrating the book’s most emotional moments. An intriguing potential love triangle seems inevitable, but this story is all about youthful apprehension and hesitation. Some readers might be frustrated with RV’s (and thus the book’s) slow progress, but by focusing on subtler plot points, RV comes to terms with issues of sex, religion, and race at his own pace.
A coming-of-age novel focused on its endearing narrator’s introspection rather than typical teenage drama.Pub Date: April 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64890-171-3
Page Count: 283
Publisher: NineStar Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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