A trippy tale packed with high-tech inventions and old-school mystery that feels like a wildly captivating video game.
In Mathison’s novel, a man endeavors to secure his inheritance from a mysterious uncle while exploring the old man’s sprawling English estate and questioning the very nature of reality.
Kris Robinson embarks on an epic journey when, in an effort to explore his alternative selves, he consumes high-tech drugs that cause temporary amnesia. As the voices in his head (which call themselves the “Storytellers” and guide him on his psychedelic journey) say, “Imagine—a sip, a swallow, and voilà! A tabula rasa!” After this brief glimpse into the perhaps not-too-distant future, the book switches to a second-person perspective, and the rest of the novel takes on a distinct video-game aspect as readers navigate the strange proceedings from Kris’ vantage point. Kris receives a letter from a mysterious uncle, Arthur Hanover, asking him to come to his English estate to claim his inheritance, but readers will feel as though they’re the ones going through the motions: “Standing there is a courier asking you to sign for a packet. What in the world? The packet has come from ‘Allensby, Bixby, Crosby & Sons & Daughters, Barristers and Solicitors’ from a town in England you’ve never heard of.” From there, readers are launched into an intriguing mansion-set mystery as Kris travels to England and meets a cast of colorful characters (including a devious head butler and the housekeeper’s friendly grandson) while trying to uncover the mystery of his long lost “uncle”…and the meaning of existence itself. The “Storyteller” voices occasionally pop in to hint at solutions for both Kris and readers as the protagonist is repeatedly pulled out of one reality and into another. Mind-bending scenes (such as lavish dinner parties that devolve into intense competitions and an impromptu disco party) ultimately make the narrative feel like the literary version of a Black Mirror TV episode. The novel is based on a DVD adventure game that the author made in the late 1990s, which perhaps accounts for its immersive feel. Occasionally confusing, always entertaining, and undeniably fun, Mathison’s yarn is a truly unique reading experience.
A trippy tale packed with high-tech inventions and old-school mystery that feels like a wildly captivating video game.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798886451238
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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