A richly textured portrait full of tension and desperate hope.
In this coming-of-age novel, a gay Black man looks back on his childhood on the mean streets of Baltimore in the 1960s—and in an even meaner home, haunted by domestic violence.
It’s 1964, and 5-year-old Grant and his two younger sisters move from the small town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, to Baltimore with their 21-year-old mother, Carol, and her new husband, David. During Grant’s first night in the city, bunking at David’s mother’s home, he’s beaten by David’s heroin-addict brother, Axel, just before the police storm in to arrest his attacker for theft. Things get worse when David moves the family into their own house and starts violently abusing Carol and, soon, Grant. Outdoors, Grant and his sisters navigate a neighborhood besieged by drugs and crime and where they discover more than one corpse. Despite these traumas, Grant feels part of a vibrant, if sketchy, community, with charismatic figures such as David’s Uncle Ike, a feared drug dealer who takes care of his own, and Mister Willy, a sightless neighborhood griot who subtly validates Grant’s queerness, telling him, “don’t ever explain yourself, just be yourself.” Ratleff’s meandering narrative luxuriates in period detail and historical events that slowly build in the protagonist’s young mind into a racial consciousness that erupts with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and tense encounters with White National Guardsmen during Baltimore’s ensuing riots. The author’s sometimes-gritty, other times lyrical prose conveys Grant’s terror at the violence surrounding him with memorable imagery—“Without warning my stepfather had both his hands around my mother’s throat, choking her,” Grant observes at one point, likening David’s pose to “a tango dancer dipping his partner”—but also registers quieter currents of family anguish: “She no longer loved him,” he writes of Grant’s Aunt Porch as she tends her dying husband, but “After months of tending bedpans and holding a hand that withered with each day, her hate faded to pity, and pity flirted with forgiveness.” The result is a gripping tale of a child trying to assert himself against a cruel but enticing world.
A richly textured portrait full of tension and desperate hope.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73-552530-3
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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