A pensive, ardent, but sometimes-trying book of poetry.
Cromer juxtaposes carnality and grief in this volume of poetry.
In her debut collection, the author considers some of the major chords of life—love, lust, and loss. A dream lover is the focus of one rapturous poem; an abusive relationship, described as a “horrible hell,” is at the center of another. The narrator suffers the agony of having an unfaithful partner but experiences all-consuming ecstasy with someone else. She details the push-pull nature of a love-hate relationship and struggles with loneliness, longing, and temptation. Poems of desire and a ravenous sexual appetite mix with reflections on mortality. “3rd Street” is a tender remembrance of a “man I loved dearly, headed for early death.” “Annihilation” ponders the nature of time, which “shows no mercy as it hurries by / The only thing real that will never die.” The speaker mourns the death of someone close in “Believe” but trusts that “Through doors of memories, you will travel.” In another poem, faith serves to illuminate the darkness: “Discover now all that is good / Become who you are and be what you should.” The collection also includes a poem about robins, written by the author’s grandmother in 1956, which provides some insight into the author’s poetic style. Cromer’s work is surprisingly sensual. “I want to feel your flowing hair, falling on my naked skin / Opening my mouth, I feel your tongue moving in,” she writes. Later, she finds herself reduced to “A pulsation of throbbing waves, wet breakers of highest, cresting want / Your skin and scent excite me, as your tongue moves to taunt.” She is equally deft at describing the sinister side of humanity, like a partner who is “Hurtful and dangerous as black ice.” That said, Cromer is not immune to clichés, describing the way “our bodies together would melt.” Unfortunately, the cloying AABB rhyme scheme detracts from the emotional depth of her words. Likewise, the desperate fixation on possessing a lover begins to wear the reader down over the course of 100-plus pages.
A pensive, ardent, but sometimes-trying book of poetry.Pub Date: July 24, 2022
ISBN: 9781665565172
Page Count: 150
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
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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