A lively coming-of-age story that’s sure to resonate with anyone who looks back fondly on their childhood summers.
Dodd presents a novel about the unexpected pivotal moments and pleasures of growing up.
In 1994, Thomas Ransom “Ran” Fox Jr. looks back two decades to when he was 12 years old and sent, reluctantly, to spend the summer with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Breland on Pawleys Island, South Carolina. With no friends in the area, a gruff uncle who appears resentful for no identifiable reason, and—worst of all—no working television for easy entertainment, the subsequent three months seem like they’ll be irredeemably bleak (save, of course, for Aunt Sarah’s excellent peanut butter and banana sandwiches). Then Ran meets Joey, a local boy his age who not only helps Ran finish his yard work in half the time, but also introduces him to an intricate ecosystem of summertime adolescent adventure. Suddenly, there are girls to be kissed, sunrises to wake up early for, and arcade games to play at local hangout King’s, where he can enjoy snow cones (“You can try all our snowball flavors!” says the girl behind the counter there. “They’re really just snow cones, but we call them snowballs”). There are also complicated family histories to confront—including one that explains Uncle Breland’s initial resistance to having Ran come to stay. Dodd’s writing is lucid and engaging. Just as the island setting is densely imagined, so, too, are the book’s characters carefully and precisely observed; Ran’s first-person narration is sustained and observant, offering a wry, pleasurable foray into an adolescent mind. The story itself isn’t always surprising, but this is part of its allure, as a pleasant nostalgia becomes apparent in individual plot points (Ran's hopeless crush on older girl Heather Altman plucks especially familiar strings) to the chapter titles lifted from old 1970s songs (“Drift Away,” “Smoke on the Water,” “What's Going On”).
A lively coming-of-age story that’s sure to resonate with anyone who looks back fondly on their childhood summers.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780991533282
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Rolos Tuesday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2023
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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