Rambunctious from the get-go, this zany tale still has plenty of lessons to teach.
A debut road novel offers a coming-of-age tale.
It is August 1999, and 21-year-old Chaz Chase is on the road. With his 1959 Cadillac convertible he calls Pam Grier, a fedora, and a trunkload of unwanted screenplays (among other items), he calls the American highway home. His sidekick is a talking pit bull (only Chaz can hear him) named Max. Max was a Hollywood director in a previous life, and he loves to expound on the cinema of old (The Lady From Shanghai is just one of the many black-and-white movies mentioned). While on the road, man and dog talk about films and life and trade friendly insults (Max tells Chaz: “You sing as well as you write,” and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment). Where exactly are they headed? As Chaz explains at one point, he is “just wandering around trying to find myself. But I’m proving to be very illusive.” Chaz is also “processing” his divorce and coming to terms with a number of issues from his past. He reflects on things like how he used to set things on fire and his outlandish valedictorian speech. In this process of finding himself, Chaz also discovers a girl named Clitty. Clitty is just as outrageous as her name would suggest. The two form quite a pair, but is she the one Chaz is looking for? How will she react when he explains the true, darker reason he has embraced a nomadic lifestyle?
A story starring a young man with a fedora, a chatty dog, and an affection for a girl named Clitty has all the makings of a bonkers adventure. This is exactly what Kline’s narrative proves to be. The pages overflow with one-liners and silly wordplay. When Chaz spies a “No Cow Tipping!” sign, he wonders: “How much do you tip a cow? Twenty percent?” There are gags about turds, piss, and a man with three testicles. Things are made more absurd when the first-person narrative occasionally gives way to a screenplay format. Though the humor may not always prove to be sidesplitting, the mood is kept light enough for readers to take an interest in this oddball hero. But the book is at its best when venturing into more earnest material. At one point, Chaz makes a trip to visit his aging father in Santa Cruz, California. As much as the scene could be played for laughs, it is striking to see their strained relationship in action. Ultimately, underneath the fedora is a man trying to find his place in a tough world. And as much as the story talks about dog pee and Max’s advice to “Grab life by the throat and spit in its face,” the final pages end on a serious, if completely wacky, note about the precious, ephemeral nature of existence. It turns out a goofy fellow and his talking pooch provide as good a reason as any to consider what it means to be alive.
Rambunctious from the get-go, this zany tale still has plenty of lessons to teach. (appendix)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
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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