A surprisingly introspective, appealingly spicy, and thoroughly original dominatrix story.
A novel focuses on the double life of a Manhattan woman.
By day, Cristela Maria Davila is a leasing agent, showing apartments to prospective tenants, but in the evenings, she becomes dominatrix-for-hire “Mistress Clara.” She works at “Belle’s House of Unusual Pleasures,” a BDSM dungeon for customers wishing to indulge their kinkiest fetishes and participate in erotic role play. Clara endured a rough childhood. Her impoverished single Venezuelan mother provided for her and her brother, Alex, through welfare checks and food stamps. The novel thoughtfully examines how that upbringing both affected Clara’s financial perspective and informed her perceptions of men. With chapter headings named for both vices and virtues, the book chronicles Clara’s devilish exploits alongside her co-workers at the dungeon—Virginia, Justine, Sin, and Daisy—all contributing unique intimate histories of their own. Through the interactive, colorfully described fantasy sessions with her clients, Clara begins to become empowered by her simulated dominance of the men who hire her. She separates herself from other classic service providers as her role play, while physical, hypersexualized, and arousing, remains strictly noncoital. In keeping Clara’s narration smooth and her personality curious, clever, and warm, De Soprontu tempers the more risqué scenes with a character who initially enjoys the extra income but eventually embraces the theatrical thrill of the spectacle. A story of sex, identity, and renewal, the novel effectively intertwines Clara’s past and present lives in a way that makes her tale a simultaneously compelling, intriguing, and effortlessly entertaining read. The provocative nature of the story will, naturally, appeal to readers of erotica, as the author never skimps on potent passages of steamy dialogue and racy scenes between Clara and her cohorts. Often their interplay expands outward to include threesomes and foursomes or activities that feature sex toys, clothing, and even food (readers won’t look at a snack cake the same way again). Yet through Clara’s intimately social interactions, De Soprontu imparts views on themes of poverty, class differences, race, identity, self-preservation, strength, and deliverance, all tightly bound within the intricate, acutely psychological opera of dominance and submission interplay.
A surprisingly introspective, appealingly spicy, and thoroughly original dominatrix story.Pub Date: July 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73319-500-3
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
