An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.
An aging writer in love with his neighbor traces the stories of her family back for decades.
Peter “Z” Zemeckis won the National Book Award back in 1997, but when readers meet him in 2012, he has eased his way into retirement and irrelevance. He’s about to fulfill the purpose of the little blue pill he swallowed earlier in the night when his date is interrupted by his neighbor and “unrequited love,” Nancy Chu, who asks to borrow his car to rescue her daughter, Charlotte, from a bad situation at a bar. Fascinated with tracing the history of Nancy’s family, Z rewinds to 1977 and the story of Amy, a teenage barrel-racing champion in Amarillo, Texas, whose pregnancy scare forces her to re-evaluate her priorities. “A baby fell out of thin air and she had to let go of everything to make sure she could catch it. Maybe she didn’t want to pick all that stuff back up.” Then it’s off to 1986 and Chinese immigrant Zhiyu, who painstakingly cooks a duck in preparation for dinner with his daughter, our Nancy, and her new boyfriend, Eric. In 2001, Eric and Nancy divorce and Nancy chooses her high-powered career at IBM, leaving Eric, a physics professor, to raise their 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte, alone (that is, if you don’t count the occasional help from his new girlfriend, Amy). Rogers crafts a richly textured vision of everyday life as he explores the ways the bonds of family stretch and collapse over generations. His characters struggle with questions about what it means to be a spouse, a parent, a daughter. In one of several physics metaphors, Z explains that “radioactive atoms also have ‘daughters.’ Parent atoms expend their energy in waves until eventually decaying into different elements altogether.…Why? Because. Just the way of the universe. But ask any father, and he’ll probably tell you: that’s just fine with him.” Rogers is at his best in the details, grounding characters with tidbits like Amy naming her horse Patton “after the American general. Not the actual general. The one from the movie.” The prose, funneled through Z’s narration, never drags; the bungalow where Eric and Charlotte live post-divorce is described as having “the aspect of a man who isn’t growing a beard so much as not shaving.”
An authentic and poignant depiction of the complex, contradictory relationships among family members.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647792015
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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