A mild, knowing campus comedy of stagnation and reinvention.
Mathematics, midlife restlessness, and a campus mystery converge in Talvila’s satire of academic life.
Jeff Orange is an untenured professor at British Columbia’s fictional Invigus University. He’s frittered the summer away on an expansion of √2π, whose denominators amusingly keep turning up prime (“It was such a simple calculation but so puzzling”). Elaine Plum, his perpetually overworked colleague, has spent hers relearning some of the algebra she’s forgotten while spending all her time teaching. Along with department chair Howard Quince, they orbit the mystery of a drug-dispensing professor called Ed Lemon, who has disappeared and posthumously narrates much of the story. Orange and Plum are drawn into intrigues involving a Romani visiting scholar, an espionage-related claim on Orange’s research, and deep personal secrets. Secret sibling and gender-related plot twists ensue, relationships are swapped, and the cast of eccentrics settles into a warm, mutually accepting community. The plot is cut with many mathematical digressions about topology, prime numbers, and infinite series; the book also has a sustained theme of self-reinvention, with investigations into cross-dressing, hormone use, and variations of sexuality and identity. But beneath the surface, the book’s main preoccupation is academic precarity: the gulf between the research stars and the “foot soldiers” who do the teaching, the comforts of community among faculty oddballs, and campus drama and politics. Talvila, a retired mathematics professor, clearly knows his terrain. His lightly jaundiced sketches of committee theater, the hypocrisies of the publish-or-perish paradigm, and campus credentialism ring true and amusing. The slow-burning disappearance plot keeps things moving without ever generating real tension, which suits the novel’s affectionate, unhurried tone and broadens its appeal beyond an academic audience. (The frequent mathematical interludes have the opposite effect, at least for the uninitiated.) The resulting mix is generally pleasant and good-humored rather than sharp—stopping short of drawing blood, this is a satire that’s content to affectionately tease its subjects, with an undercurrent of melancholy.
A mild, knowing campus comedy of stagnation and reinvention.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781038354792
Page Count: 234
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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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