McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.
Two lovers navigate the legacy of an event that threatens to define both their relationship and their identities.
Readers familiar with McBride’s novel The Lesser Bohemians (2016) will recognize this book’s main characters: Eily, a drama student who turns 20 midway through the novel’s timeline, and her 40-year-old lover, Stephen, an established actor in the London scene who is currently directing an autobiographical film about his traumatic past. Told in interwoven storylines—the Now in which the couple dances around a painful conversation, and scenes from the past which has led them here—the book is narrated through Eily’s skintight stream-of-consciousness voice, which leaves very little room for autonomous perspectives. At times, this may render Eily an untrustworthy narrator, but her acrobatic, muscular prose lends such depth and nuance to the world she inhabits that the reader may be startled to resurface from the spell of her voice only to realize they are indeed in the same Camden flat watching Stephen eat the same cheese sandwich which he has been picking at for the vast majority of the current-time storyline. As an exercise in language, the book sings, illustrating the logic behind the many comparisons of McBride to modernist innovators like Joyce. More problematic is the way McBride’s investment in the immensity of Eily’s interior world is put into service of the plot. The event that has come to sever Stephen and Eily’s intimacy is clearly broadcast throughout the book, yet, when it is revealed in all its gory horror in the final 50 pages, it has very little impact on a reader already emotionally exhausted by Eily’s relentless telling. The freshness of the Modernist project to overturn traditional modes of storytelling doesn’t work in a novel that presents its climactic moment in a more conventional manner, as an epiphany, but arrives there in such discursive fashion that Eily’s darkest secret feels like reiteration rather than revelation. Not even Eily’s frank, electric eroticism can enliven the novel’s overwhelming sense of stagnation as it explores a story that has already been told by characters who have already lived, and relived, its main events.
McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780571384211
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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