An engaging, SF–enriched tale with striking fantasy elements and diverse characters.
A ragtag crew searches for the fragments of an ancient wonder in this dystopian novel.
In a future Florida that includes augmented reality and biowarfare and is run by mega-corporations, Nagash “Gash” Jensen is a jaded veteran and ex–private investigator. He’s on the run from WalCo, a mega-corporation he angered after a botched job. He becomes the personal bodyguard of expert hacker Selina Kan, an aspiring archaeologist turning to less than legal means to gain access to the conflict-ridden island of Rhodes, a former Greek territory “with no major corporate interests to keep the peace.” Chasing down her father’s mysterious research into the missing pieces of the Colossus of Rhodes, the ancient statue of the sun god Helios, she believes there is more to the legend than meets the eye. Selina and Gash are joined by her assistant, Frederick Almond, a young man off the streets of Detroit, fresh, tough, and ready for the improbable. Their covert operation is funded by the mysterious, mob boss–like Hemmingway. Meanwhile, Interpol agents Sage and Hiroyuki are investigating a parallel ancient world mystery: that of international crimes and violence involving the Knights Hospitaller and the White Lotus gang—with Rhodes as the site of the action. As Selina faces sinister forces warning her away from the Colossus mystery, she and her group face WalCo on its hunt for Gash and get caught in the crossfire of the Knights Hospitaller and White Lotus. In the process, Selina and her cohorts encounter technological advances beyond their imaginations while the secrets they learn shake their understanding of humanity itself. The book’s prominent themes are found family, identity, and belonging; the dangers of technologically advanced mega-corporations; good versus evil; and humans versus mystical beings. Featuring parallel perspectives and storylines through various character viewpoints, the plot connects different pasts and presents together neatly. The story presents rich worldbuilding details without meandering and is consistently suspenseful. The focus on deliberately inclusive characterizations in the predominantly cis, White, male SF genre is masterful and commendable. Leunig seamlessly creates the voices of a gender-androgynous person (Sage) and a young woman of color (Selina), addressing issues of racism and heteronormativity without preaching or reducing the players to identity politics.
An engaging, SF–enriched tale with striking fantasy elements and diverse characters.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1951393175
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Spaceboy Books LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2022
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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