A harshly playful, lengthy attack on the mystique of an ancient era.
Fischer presents a darkly comedic novel about a eunuch in the court of Nebuchadnezzar II in this fiction debut.
The narrator, Nergal, is a self-described “middle-aged eunuch slave-scribe.” His master is Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of the Babylonian empire. Nebuchadnezzar is seated upon the throne of the Golden Bull and is viewed as a living god. There is a belief that the king must sire a certain number of bastard children every year if the empire is to enjoy agricultural success. It is partly for this purpose that the king maintains such an extensive harem. Yet the aging monarch is not always effective at siring. Nergal is an official scribe of the harem, but the official narrative paints over much of the true horror that Nergal experiences firsthand. When the unfortunate eunuch slave-scribe is not helping Nebuchadnezzar become erect by taking the king’s “skewer of undercooked chicken” in his hands, he is attempting to help the king through his constipation, or simply trying to cheer him up. Suffering from complaints including insomnia and depression, Nebuchadnezzar is hardly the indestructible warrior-king figure the common people are led to believe he is. And despite all of Nergal’s efforts, times are tough in the empire: Droughts threaten the food supply, and lives are lost in bread riots. Even the palace orgies aren’t as good as they used to be. Nergal knows about the status of the empire at large because his brother, Uruk, is an important figure who can divine knowledge from such unlikely sources as a bull’s stomach or a sheep’s lung. What does the future hold? From the perspective of anyone truly in the know, it doesn’t look good.
Throughout the text, the reader learns a lot about Nergal’s difficult past and present. Much is written of his violent scribe father—this man would beat Uruk and Nergal if they didn’t complete their assignments, but also beat them if they did. A tone of bleak humor permeates the work. A description of Nergal’s father describes how, in life, the man was “tall and cadaverous, and in death, his features had changed little.” Nergal is infatuated with a concubine named Siduri. Could anything be sadder than a eunuch who loves a concubine? It may be an obvious conflict, but it nevertheless provides the story with tension. Though Nergal’s misery is played for laughs, the reader cannot help but feel sympathy for such a sad sack. He is a protagonist who digs into the vileness and depravity all around him—and that depravity can be extraneous; the reader is constantly reminded of brutal practices like the king’s habit of bathing in the blood and the mutilated bodies of his enemies (not to mention the Codex Castratum). Ancient accounts of these times can teach us much, but Nergal’s perspective brings to life just how awful things must really have been. Any fantasies about the era are blown away with reminders of atrocities—such as how the harem is populated by enslaved girls who were taken violently from their homes.
A harshly playful, lengthy attack on the mystique of an ancient era.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781732579941
Page Count: 502
Publisher: The Gabbro Head Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2023
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
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