An intriguing exploration of art and wealth spearheaded by messy, engrossing characters.
Art, money, and ambition collide, first at a prestigious college and again in New York City.
In 2011, 19-year-old Louisa Arceneaux feels out of place at Wrynn College of Art in the fictional New England town of Stonewater. The Louisiana native is attending Wrynn on scholarship, and most of her wealthy peers initially dismiss her paintings as “Southern Gothic Lite.” Louisa’s roommate is the icy and beautiful Karina Piontek, daughter of rich yet unhappy art collectors, who had a mental breakdown last semester before returning suspiciously quickly to Wrynn. Karina and Louisa, both queer women, are drawn to each other, first as fellow creatives, then as friends, then lovers, and Karina becomes the model for Louisa’s new series of gruesome and beautiful paintings. Karina is also sleeping with senior Preston Utley, a controversial figure who runs a mildly successful blog called The Wart, where he posts provocative photoshopped images designed to maximize internet traffic. Preston desires to “live outside capitalism” and produce truly radical art while at the same time he's desperately seeking a way to free himself from dependence on his toxic father’s wealth. Meanwhile, washed-up painter Robert Berger comes to Wrynn as the artist-in-residence, trying to restart a stalled career that never lived up to the promise of his controversial breakout painting, Dying Man, a portrait of his best friend that Berger painted while Vince was in the hospital dying of AIDS. Preston, Karina, and Louisa push themselves to challenge the boundaries of their art and their abilities until a vicious prank upends all the characters’ lives. In the aftermath, they try to make fresh starts in New York City, where it’s only a matter of time before their paths converge again. Though the novel can at times be heavy-handed in its messaging, it does an admirable job of parsing such difficult issues as the role of capitalism in art, and references to events such as the Occupy movement give the novel real-world context. The main characters have believable flaws and nuances, and the narrative is adept at interrogating the power imbalances in both the characters’ personal relationships and in an art world rife with sexism and classism.
An intriguing exploration of art and wealth spearheaded by messy, engrossing characters.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59349-643-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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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