What starts out a smoothly entertaining social satire turns out to expect a little work from you, dear reader.
As failure and shame threaten to demolish her world, a Black woman throws a dinner party...and thinks wistfully about her past.
Known as "The Wolf" by her sister lesbians at Bryn Mawr 20 years ago, Liselle is now married to a White man, a lawyer-turned-politician named Winn Anderson. Winn has just lost an election for the state legislature, and Liselle has planned a dinner party as a last hurrah for their biggest supporters. Her doubts about the evening are compounded by the fear that her husband will be hauled away by the FBI before dessert; though he doesn't know it yet, she's been told he may soon be indicted for corruption. Set in the author's hometown of Philadelphia, this novel—part social satire, part character study—takes its title from a trickster in Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Liselle read Lorde her senior year of college, during her brief affair with a woman named Selena Octave. Though they haven't seen each other in years, the pile-up of disappointments in Liselle's life inspires her to call and leave a one-word message for her old friend. Solomon excels at ironic description—one character has "the look of someone who had aged out of playing the rich jerk in an eighties teen movie"—and builds further ironies into her depiction of race and class. While Liselle is often called Lisa, Lisette, Liesl, etc., she herself is afraid to say aloud the name of the woman helping her in the kitchen, Xochitl. In contemplating the conversational possibilities of the gathering, she thinks, “There was so much lying all the time, particularly when you got together with people who were not Black. Bland observations about schools, neighborhoods, and the words 'kids' and 'safe' and 'family' tried to cover up a landscape of volcanos oozing with blood, pus, and shit.” The last page of the book will leave you stunned. Solomon's decision about where to end her dinner party puts her in a lineage of modernist party hosts like Woolf and Proust.
What starts out a smoothly entertaining social satire turns out to expect a little work from you, dear reader.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-14005-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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
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