Not claiming to provide any answers, this story will compel readers to consider both sides of the gun control issue.
Cowen’s debut graphic novel explores gun control and gun violence–related issues.
Set in Austin, Texas, the story follows Adam and Maggie Brooks, newlywed “progressives” who are trying to start a family; Adam is a high school counselor and Maggie works as a video producer at National Public Radio. When the couple gets robbed at gunpoint outside of a market (where they just purchased a pregnancy test), their relationship is put to the test: Maggie—afraid for her and Adam’s lives after the robbers identify their names and home address after stealing his wallet and her purse—purchases a gun without telling her husband. Having a gun in their home ignites intense debates about safety statistics regarding gun ownership, the Second Amendment, and license to carry regulations, among other issues. Complicating matters are Adam’s three overbearing sisters; the news of a mass shooting at the Texas capitol building in which 47 people are killed; and a deeply troubled teen named Dave, a highly medicated high school senior who has aspirations of being a filmmaker. As Dave’s home life deteriorates, his mental health spirals out of control and the prevalence of violence in his everyday life (Quentin Tarantino is a role model) threatens to push him to do something unimaginable. As a conflicted Maggie has second thoughts about buying the gun, her husband surprisingly finds solace in gun culture and embraces his aggressive machismo by becoming “Rambo Adam.”
The raw emotional intensity of the couple’s struggle to reconcile their differences regarding gun ownership and save their crumbling marriage is complemented by an array of profound quotes from historic figures including Martin Luther King, Jr. (“Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it”), Abraham Lincoln (“He permits war for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us”), and Susan B. Anthony (“Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation”). A sequence toward the novel’s end, in which Maggie creates a piece for NPR sharing her story with the world, features some powerful Jungian-inspired wisdom: “If we learn to deal with our own shadows. We have done something real for others. We have succeeded in shouldering a small part of the unsolved problems of our day.” The brilliantly understated approach to the look and tone of the graphic novel can’t be overlooked. The seemingly simplistic drawings by Gabriel Wexler create a stark contrast to the complex subject matter; Wexler manages to convey an impressive range of emotions experienced by the characters through an uncluttered and minimalistic perspective. A dream sequence in which Molly’s dead, gun-toting father (who traces his lineage back to the lawman Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral) shoots and kills one of the couple’s robbers while a helpless Adam watches paralyzed with fear, for example, is emotionally stunning.
Not claiming to provide any answers, this story will compel readers to consider both sides of the gun control issue.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
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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