Romantic comedy fans will be delighted by this fun story about relationships and suburban living.
A young woman in the midst of a nasty divorce inherits a dilapidated house and decides to try her luck living in a new town in this novel.
Thirty-five-year-old Mallory Martin Bach has hit rock bottom. As a result of her soon-to-be-ex husband’s adulterous behavior, she’s lost not only her marriage, but also her home and even her job. Making matters worse, Mallory’s favorite aunt, the only family member who really understood her, has just died. The book opens with the reading of the will and the bombshell that Aunt Maggie has bequeathed her large house to Mallory. With few other options, Mallory decides to leave Manhattan and try living in suburban Huckleberry Hills, New Jersey. When she arrives in the neat and tidy neighborhood, she finds her new house is barely habitable. In addition to the many structural repairs the home requires, every room is filled to the brim with evidence that Maggie suffered from an extreme hoarding obsession. As Mallory begins the onerous process of clearing out the house, she meets the bossy but handsome neighbor across the street, Nick Holloway, whom she finds as enticing as he is infuriating. As Nick begins to prove himself rather helpful, she warms to him. The only problem is that Mallory has already promised herself she will never become reliant on another man. When it feels like Nick is starting to get too close, Mallory has to decide what she really wants out of her new life. Told entirely from Mallory’s perspective, the narrative displays a quirky, conversational tone that is consistent throughout. Full of witty banter, flirtatious glances, and sexy smirks, the interactions between the characters are lively and engaging. Despite the light tone of the prose, the novel deals with weighty topics, including emotionally abusive relationships, mental health, aging relatives, and self-doubt. At the same time, the story also highlights many of the ridiculous aspects of suburban living with humor and sass. From nonsensical housing association rules to the jewelry parties that occupy young mothers, Wolff and Flynn don’t miss an opportunity to poke fun at the burbs. Although the trajectory of the tale is predictable, the journey to its inevitable conclusion is solidly entertaining.
Romantic comedy fans will be delighted by this fun story about relationships and suburban living.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68281-569-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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