Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.
A story of family, fury, a missing girl, and what society doesn't see.
Twelve years ago, 13-year-old Ruthy Ramirez disappeared after track practice one day, never to be seen again. Left in the black hole where there is “no such thing now as a map” are the women in Ruthy's family, who never get over her loss. Told from the alternating perspectives of Ruthy’s younger and older sisters, Nina and Jessica; her mother, Dolores; and Ruthy herself, this is a story of the fights women encounter and the ways they survive, set in a Pentecostal Puerto Rican community in Staten Island. More than a decade after Ruthy’s disappearance, Jessica is convinced she's seen her on Catfight, a reality TV series where women literally fight their cast-mates to stay in the town house where they're filming and win the grand prize. Jessica and Nina begin binge-watching the show, analyzing every detail about the woman onscreen, comparing her with their memories of Ruthy and their expectations of whether a near-homeless raging alcoholic is the woman Ruthy could have grown up to become. They try to keep this secret from their diabetic mother, but their plan unravels when Dolores figures out that they're not heading off to a retreat for young Christian women but are instead driving to Boston, where the show is filmed. The three end up road-tripping together, along with a friend, and it’s Dolores, not her daughters, who schemes her way into a nightclub where the Catfight girls will perform. There’s a delightfully subversive and maverick quality to the way first-time novelist Jiménez gives her characters the freedom to tell the truth as they see it, whether it’s Dolores negotiating with God in expletive-laden prayers or Nina explaining the fallout of graduating from college with an expensive biology degree only to end up folding lingerie for a toxic White boss. The book's humor alongside Jiménez's willingness to include everything from pop culture to intergenerational trauma is the reason this book is a page-turner.
Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781538725962
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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