A sharp-edged novella that delivers its story at the pace of a highlight reel.
Browning presents a novella about a former party girl whose unlikely connection with a gentle beast jolts her out of a self-destructive spiral.
Tabitha Eggs is an alcoholic, Napa Valley, California-based trust-funder who’s been exiled from her privileged world because of her immaturity, compared to others in her friend group. She goes on a retreat into the redwood forests of Del Norte County, where she plans to drink and smoke herself into oblivion. However, her path of self-destruction meets an obstacle when she discovers two dead bodies, whom she suspects are the previous owners of her new property. In the wake of this discovery comes a series of Bigfoot hunters, searching for the alleged beastly killer in the woods around her new home; they’re accompanied by protesters who want the Bigfoot hunting to stop. Tabitha confronts her real estate agent, Annie, who seems to know more than she’s letting on about the situation. Her suspicions are confirmed when she comes face-to-face with a kind sasquatch who saves her from a wildfire. Thus begins a strange love story that revels in its offbeat tone, playing familiar romance tropes completely straight while cutting through exposition like an impatient reader skipping to the good parts. The prose moves briskly, with snappy characters and a refusal to dwell on the granular logistics of the novel’s premise. Indeed, it’s less about worldbuilding and more about the emotional transformation, although Tabitha’s change of heart feels too fast to land with full impact, jumping from nihilism to purpose without much introspection. Likewise, the romance with her sasquatch savior exists more as a concept than as a developed relationship; readers will wish for more from their connection—more buildup, more tension, more resonance, more space to see it grow. That said, the novel delivers the quirky, unhinged entertainment it promises, and the protagonist’s voice is distinct and memorable. Overall, it’s a wild ride that’s as compelling as it is unorthodox.
A sharp-edged novella that delivers its story at the pace of a highlight reel.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9798988869917
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Sonoma Mediaworks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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