A thoughtful exploration of boyhood, achievement, and friendship that’s sometimes weighed down by its seriousness.
In Jacobs’ novel, two boys form a turbulent friendship at an elite prep school in late-1970s Southern California.
Luke Burnett has once again found himself in the crosshairs of school bully Lance Drexx when he’s unexpectedly rescued by Denny Drummond, a computer prodigy who befriends famed physicist Richard Feynman. As the two start high school at Stone Canyon Prep, an intense institution of learning for the scions of Southern California’s power players, they bond over their tumultuous home lives. Denny helps Luke succeed in his math and science classes, while Luke tutors him in the humanities. Over the years, they witness a science experiment gone awry that leads to two students being expelled, are flummoxed by the addition of female students to their previously all-male student body, and narrowly avoid trouble when a performance-enhancing scheme gone wrong sends members of the basketball team to the hospital. One night after graduation, Denny cracks under the stress from his family situation and commits an act that will reverberate through his adult life. Years later, he reaches out to Luke for one last favor. After all this time, what holds their friendship together? Jacobs’ novel excels at portraying the rarefied world of an elite prep school and depicting the wild, sometimes slightly implausible, hijinks that the students get up to. The language is frequently a stumbling block, however; the dense prose has a distancing effect, blunting the adolescent sense of immediacy that the author endeavors to capture. (“A sea of eyeballs from summer-sunned faces, mine included, rotated upward toward the rebuilt ceiling bankrolled by the female surge in enrollment.”) Denny is a difficult character, a computer science prodigy who torches his own future multiple times. He drops in and out of his friends’ lives, making them the targets of his mood swings, but Luke’s empathy for him, built on the knowledge of his secrets, will help to secure readers’ compassion.
A thoughtful exploration of boyhood, achievement, and friendship that’s sometimes weighed down by its seriousness.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781644284926
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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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