An intelligently executed love letter to Black female empowerment and the world of rock music.
A fictional history of a 1970s Black rock singer with a complicated past.
Sunny has just been named the new editor-in-chief of the storied music magazine Aural—the first Black person and woman to hold the position—when a scoop falls into her lap. It’s 2015, and Opal Jewel, “the ebony-skinned provocateur, the fashion rebel, the singer/screecher/Afro-Punk ancestor,” is contemplating a reunion tour with her old musical partner, Nev Charles, an Englishman who’s since embarked on a successful solo career; Opal herself hasn’t performed live in more than 25 years. Sunny begins writing a book—this book, an oral history of Opal and Nev’s brief but iconic collaboration during the early '70s—and focuses particularly on the disastrous 1971 concert in which a racist mob kills Opal and Nev’s drummer, a Black man named Jimmy Curtis. Sunny’s interest in the story is more than merely professional: Curtis, she discloses in an "Editor’s Note" at the very beginning of the book, was her father—and Opal his mistress while Sunny’s mother was married to Curtis and pregnant with her. Nevertheless, the first section of the book bears all the hallmarks of a rigorously reported work of journalism. Sunny interviews everyone from the label’s receptionist to Opal’s stylist and stitches together quotes to form a multifaceted narrative of Opal and Nev’s rise. But as Sunny reconstructs the events leading up to her father’s death, she hears something that changes the story she thought she knew—and forces her to shed her protective, professional shell. Debut author Walton wields the oral history form with easy skill, using its suggestion of conversation and potential for humor to give her characters personality. “But also Virgil sold reefer. Everybody loves the reefer man,” Sunny quotes Opal saying about her stylist. Immediately after: “VIRGIL LAFLEUR: I styled ladies’ hair. That’s how I paid my bills. I don’t know what she’s told you.” And the author adeptly captures the particular tenor of discussions of race in the early '70s (Opal’s destruction of a Confederate flag sets off the fateful riot) and in the age of memes: The creator of one Opal GIF, Sunny muses, “understood the culture and the language and this current moment of Black exasperation, and was nodding to the eerie relevance of Opal Jewel in them.”
An intelligently executed love letter to Black female empowerment and the world of rock music.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982140-16-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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.
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