A lighthearted road novel that doesn’t shy away from the inherent darkness of vampire life.
In Parker’s horror comedy series starter, a novice vampire struggles to adjust to her new reality.
“Be steely.” That’s what Sugar Bernstein’s boyfriend Curtis always told her, and it’s advice that she needs more than ever, now that her life has been completely upended. Curtis is dead; Sugar’s no longer a Manhattan condo-dwelling ad executive with a penchant for shopping, wine, and mani-pedis; and her close-knit Jewish family is far away. Now, jobless Sugar both travels and resides in a Sprinter van, avoiding people and sunlight because she’s a vampire—the effect of a bite from Alexandria, also known as She-vil, a “vamp who lives on hate.” Alexandria constantly intrudes into Sugar’s dreams; while awake, Sugar struggles to feed herself by killing small animals. Also, her twin brother keeps trying to get her to attend his daughter’s bat mitzvah, which is inconveniently scheduled for the daytime. She does find some aspects of “V-life” more appealing: She lost a few pounds that she wanted to shed, and sometimes she manages to fly; when she falls, her broken limbs heal quickly. She also discovers a chain of RV parks that cater to an undead clientele, and that vampire sex is fantastic. Still, Sugar grapples with guilt—especially when it comes to her boyfriend’s untimely death at Alexandria’s hands. She’s increasingly aware that a possibly fatal showdown with Alexandria is inevitable. Over the course of the novel, Parker delivers a winning paranormal tale with quirky details. One fanged couple that Sugar meets, for instance, lives in a converted ambulance, and readers find out that even vamps care about gas mileage. Sugar is an inspired creation who’s relatable and quick-witted, and Parker excels at witty banter, especially between Sugar and her twin. Still, there’s an effective undercurrent of seriousness: Human companionship is off the table for Sugar, who’s forced to take lives to keep hers. The first person she deliberately kills is loathsome, but she can’t help but feel moral revulsion—and sadly, there’s no turning back.
A lighthearted road novel that doesn’t shy away from the inherent darkness of vampire life.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798986205137
Page Count: 322
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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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