Full of intelligence, social consciousness, and cultural engagement.
A crew of five women friends, long-distance since college, weather the travails of their 40th year.
Each chapter of Nemens’ sophomore novel opens with a line or two from the group chat shared by Carson the writer, Gregg the politician, Hillary the doctor, Bella the litigator, and Reba the former consultant, or with one of their individual texts to or from someone else. This infrastructure helps move the timeline and the plot; in addition, a thumbnail guide to the characters appears at the beginning of the book. With five central characters, many supporting ones, and a trajectory covering two decades, almost year by year, these elements are helpful. “Another quiet stretch for the women was 2014. In the eighteen months prior they had all turned thirty (Reba, with her basketball gap year, was the first across the threshold; Gregg brought up the rear).” As the omniscient narrator goes on to fill in details from each friend, as well as current events, cultural moments, and updates on Britney Spears, it’s tempting to picture giant timelines papering the walls of the author’s study. Her management of the five-pronged, often high-drama plot, the rotating points of view, and the characters’ constant introspection is impressive. Yet somehow the sheer complexity of it all keeps the book from developing enough momentum to ever become fully immersive, and none of the five main characters evokes the kind of identification that invites the reader to connect emotionally. A typical moment has Carson meditating on the ways she and each of her friends has fallen short of their dreams. Gregg, for example, “was blind to the gotcha of promoting progressivism while being inextricably bound up with the latest (last?) stage of late-stage capitalism; she couldn’t see, or wouldn’t acknowledge, her normie marriage, the patriarchy of her prenup, how her big-shouldered and bruising careerist tendencies, cloaked as they were in pastel blazers, were only nominally better than Zeke’s cutthroat business acumen.” In fact, that cutthroat acumen of Gregg’s husband Zeke will play a major role in the book’s gut-punch climax, rewarding the reader who’s paying attention to all the details.
Full of intelligence, social consciousness, and cultural engagement.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781963108668
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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