An astute anatomy of a decadent cultural milieu.
In this novel, a rivalrous friendship in Northern California during the tech boom of the 1990s comes to a spectacular crescendo.
Steve Galanos didn’t initially like his colleague John Goertz. When John warned the phone company for which they worked of the impending disaster that came to be known as Y2K, Steve thought it was an opportunistic career move, especially since it was only 1994. But John’s case proved convincing, and he was rewarded for what was seen as his diligent prescience, an outcome that rankled Steve: “This was his master plan all along. Point out this ridiculous problem, scare everyone, and get himself a promotion.” Nevertheless, while working together on the newly created Year 2000 Conversion Team, they both discover they have a lot in common, and the two become best friends. But while John is an ambitious perfectionist on his way to building a dream life—he weds Mary, makes a killing when a new company he works for launches a successful IPO, and buys a $1 million house—Steve feels trapped in an unfulfilling career without any hopes for improvement. Not surprisingly, his feelings of inadequacy emerge in the form of profound envy: “I was completely jealous, just like on that first day I had met him. Who was this guy and what had he done to deserve all of this?” Cuesta delicately portrays Steve’s mounting discontent mixed with genuine fraternity—in fact, his jealously is only explicable in the context of his very real affection for his best friend. But when John hosts a housewarming party at his new home in swanky Los Gatos, the friendly competitiveness between them turns sinister.
The author paints a rich tableau of Northern California during the frenetically optimistic days of the tech industry and—as Y2K demonstrated—the feverish capacity for overheated fearmongering. It was a time when considerable fortunes were eagerly made and quickly lost. As John climbs the ladder of corporate success, Steve is laid off. In addition, Cuesta limns a devilishly complex psychology of envy, which plumbs the peculiar relationship between love and loathing. Finally, the author captures an emotional emptiness at the core of corporate striving, one humorously expressed in the way John handles his spirituality: “It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. He did. Firmly. And he especially believed in God’s omnipresence. And the only way he knew how to deal with that—that is, live without the fetters of conviction while God watched—was to postpone thinking about God altogether. Just as with any other chore or task, he was simply procrastinating, setting it in the back of his mind, willing to deal with it later.” The plot can drag a bit—even for a shorter novel—and the granular presentation of drearily flat lives eventually begins to take on a tedium of its own. Readers will wonder if this tale would have been more successful as a short story. Still, the ending is as unpredictable as it is thrilling, and the novel as a whole is a keen peek into a hollow culture.
An astute anatomy of a decadent cultural milieu.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-957885-00-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Celestial Eyes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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