A vibrant, gritty urban character study rich in cultural relevance, social gravitas, and interpersonal drama.
A diverse community of young men struggles with challenging queer realities in this novel.
Author and former social worker Ambrose crafts a moving profile of racial unrest and social injustice through an ethnic melting pot of young gay men living and loving in Philadelphia. Headlining the action is Babe, a queer Black youth with a “mass of thick dreadlocks” raised in the predominantly White Pennsylvania suburbs. He yearns to live a life unencumbered by racial stereotypes. The story opens in a gay bar where Babe meets Chance, a Black, cheeky, so-called wigger, who wears his pants baggy and sports purple cornrows. Chance becomes a nice distraction from Babe’s faltering relationship with Matthew, whom he suspects of cheating and using crack. Things end badly when a violent barroom brawl erupts between Babe and Matthew. Suddenly single, Babe rents out the now-vacant room in his duplex to Alise, a troubled woman of faith with a housing subsidy, an errant husband, and a son. But Babe inexplicably also invites Chance to move in as his roommate. Driven by instinct since childhood, Babe senses an opportunity to help both Alise and Chance with more than a place to live, offering them a prospect for happiness. Soon, Chance attempts to romance Babe, despite jealous Matthew resurfacing to create more melodrama. In his debut novel, State of the Nation(2018), Ambrose demonstrated a skill for characterization in his portrayal of Black teenagers living in Atlanta as a serial killer stalked the city. Here, he again intensifies the narrative with both solid characterization and a plot that generates a very realistic portrait of what it’s like to be Black in America, including scenes of Babe and Chance encountering police harassment and homophobia. There are also impressively descriptive passages throughout, demonstrating the author’s gift for introspective language, as when he evokes the concept of the inner city as “a mythic imaginarium created by white flight—barbaric microcosms within the city proper where crime and vice ruled over morality and decency.” Ambrose incorporates many heady themes, like racism, bullying, mental health, and queer identity, into a story that is smoothly written and engrossing from start to finish. The author is a writer to watch.
A vibrant, gritty urban character study rich in cultural relevance, social gravitas, and interpersonal drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64890-248-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Ninestar Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
