An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.
Classicist and poet Carson produces a scrapbooklike rendering of a lesser-known Greek tragedy.
In Herakles, staged in 416 B.C.E., Euripides imagined the demigod returning home to Thebes to find his household under assault by usurper Lykos, who is bent on eliminating the royal house of Amphitryon. As with all tragedies, much of the context is provided by a chorus—here, of old men who, though wise, can’t do much about the situation. With a collagelike text incorporating drawings and sketches, some with splashes of color, Carson works a few plot points of the original, which contains about 1,425 lines as against Carson’s few score. It’s modernized, too; Amphitryon lives in an Airstream, driven from his palace by a “totalitarian cracker.” (It’s not hard to imagine whom Carson might have been thinking of there.) Although they have taken refuge at an altar, Lykos is so irreligious as to plan to burn out Amphitryon, Herakles’ wife, and their kids, “obliged to close our lids / before we’d like.” The chorus invokes V.I. Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, while Lykos, entering with his goon squad, allows that he’s “a basically / outcomes-oriented guy.” When Herakles—H of H, that is, whose name is explained—arrives, he plangently recalls the labors he’s been set to do, again drawing on Bolshevik history and throwing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for good measure. Naturally, tragic things ensue; after a spasm of divinely induced madness that causes Herakles to distribute death a little more broadly than he might have wished, all he can say is “Alas” and long for death. Leave it to Theseus, his demidivine pal, to keep him on point: “What could be more useless than you limping offstage to die in a dead language?” Carson’s anachronisms, like those of Christopher Logue, are jarring but suggestive, and the language often attains a nobility worthy of the original tragedians, as when the chorus sings, “We go in tears. / So many swift and dirty years.”
An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3123-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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