Devastating yet hopeful stories about characters toiling to find refuge in the world.
Eight stories set around Flagstaff, Arizona.
In this debut collection, Louis, a Diné writer whose first volume of poetry won a 2018 American Book Award, writes of electricians and day laborers, custodians and aspiring writers, many of them Navajo, their lives constrained by poor pay and bad bosses, parole agreements and addiction, cultural expectations and racism. In “Volcano,” Phillip puts in 12- to 14-hour days installing conduit and running wire, all in hopes of getting a Saturday off to take his cousin’s son, who has been left in his care, on a hike. In “As Meaningless as the Origin,” the unnamed narrator gets shorted by a computer tech who has hired him to hang Sheetrock. The unrelenting grind of work, sometimes absent from fiction, takes center stage here, as Louis’ characters dig holes, fix engines, mop hallways, plaster walls, and taxi people around. Though the circumstances are often exploitative, this labor is also so closely described that Louis imbues it with beauty and worth—bestowing dignity on his characters. “Keeping my hands busy and moving product: that’s what I’d been good at—well, until I got caught,” reflects the narrator of “Usefulness,” as he’s expertly repairing a bus that will help a woman escape her alcoholic partner but also put his parole at risk. “But after that, just keeping my hands busy, my body busy.” Readers may hear echoes of Denis Johnson in brief lyrical landscape descriptions that appear throughout and the characters’ jewel-like insights, even in drug-altered states. “We weren’t ourselves and didn’t know it,” thinks the narrator of “Trickster Myths,” one of the collection’s many gut-punching pieces, as he’s about to kill a coyote, a futile attempt to right an evening gone terribly wrong. “Our outlines were blurred beyond the fault of our vision.”
Devastating yet hopeful stories about characters toiling to find refuge in the world.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-203-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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
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
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