An earnest and positive novel that explores heavy topics.
In VanPatten’s novel, a recently widowed gay father tries to help a niece whom he suspects is being abused.
After being disowned in Texas as a “sinner” by his parents, Jesse Pérez eventually finds happiness in California with his partner, David, and Matthew, their son with autism. Following David’s untimely death, Jesse and his child attempt to settle into their new reality. Another upheaval occurs with the sudden appearance of Gloria Salazar, Jesse’s teenage niece from Lubbock, who’s pregnant and reluctant to disclose details. Jesse accompanies Gloria when she gets an abortion, knowing it could be risky with Texas’ strict anti-abortion laws that even reach across state borders. Gloria wants to live with Jesse, rather than return home—but then Jesse’s brother-in-law brings her back to Texas against her will. Jesse’s reluctant to leave his routine-loving son, and he also finds himself drawn to Bobby Martínez, a widowed Californian cop he just met; however, he decides to return to the Lone Star State to help his niece. In this novel, VanPatten explores such difficult subjects as antigay bigotry, rape, grief, and religious intolerance. However, the story also has a pleasant flow, with natural, unforced dialogue. It’s very easy to tell the good people from the bad, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Bobby, for instance, is shown to be a helpful police officer who brings Jesse’s son cookies and assists with homework. At another point, a protective services agent lets Gloria stay with her for a few nights, and Jesse’s former high school teacher tells him “I like to think I helped you on your own path.” Spiteful characters, including Jesse’s parents and sister, and a Texas cop who pulls a gun on Jesse, are shown as twisted by discriminatory religious doctrines, while others act from sheer ignorance. For the most part, though, this is a sweet story of how members of chosen families can soothe and heal one another. Although the romance between Jesse and Bobby lacks surprises, this fact enhances, rather than detracts, from the pleasure of reading this comforting book.
An earnest and positive novel that explores heavy topics.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798873520886
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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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