Subdued but often incisive portrayals of everyday lives.
Bloom presents collection of short stories in which characters oscillate between loneliness and detachment.
In “A Baja Summer,” the opening and longest tale, journalistJerry Briggs has an assignment on the eponymous peninsula. As he awaits the political event he’s there to cover, he revels in excess—drinking heavily, chain-smoking cigarettes, and ingesting peyote. For company, he has Mickey Rollins, a cage fighter he’s known since childhood, and Brent Baxter, a college pal who’s in Baja for a cousin’s wedding. Jerry and Brent later go on a double date with locals Maria and Layla.Brent becomes somewhat fixated on Maria, but that may not stop Jerry from spending some time alone with her. When the assignment is done, will Jerry stick around, or will he be ready to pack his bags? The remaining eight stories are notably shorter. “Knock Yourself Out” has a similar setup to “Baja”: Burr and Leek are friends vying for the attention of Masha at a ballroom dance. The boys have planned an impromptu outing in the snowy wilderness, but their friendship could wither if Masha chooses one of them to join her on the ballroom floor. Several characters seem on the verge of isolation, even when surrounded by others. In “A Stormy Backdrop,” for instance, young Van’s pals cheer him on as he climbs a tree that’s close to keeling over. An approaching storm practically guarantees this tree will fall, and chances are that the lad will blame the people egging him on.
“A Baja Summer,” which effectively depicts a man who lives as if happiness is a distant memory, is the clear highlight of this collection. Some of the accompanying tales come across as mere snippets of longer, better-developed narratives. That’s certainly the case with “A Familiar Accord,” in which Richard Grant heads to a place called Santoro’s, where he’s part of a scheme to take care of a “racket” that’s “overextended.” It’s a moody, noirish piece that unsatisfyingly teases many promising elements, such as driver Mel and his mysterious “passenger,” who drop Richard off at Santoro’s. However, “City Country,” a snapshot of a chaotic city jam-packed with buildings and people, offers a showcase for the author’s lyrical prose: “The sidewalks blocked by legions of wide-hipped stroller pushers, bikers massaging the pavement with tread, smokers shirking their rebellion for all to whale, and when you catch a flurry of young, grit-nub children, you realize this place is merciless to a degree of comedy.” Its cast brims with intriguing characters, from fellow hunters out on a hunt to a woman who grows fond of a suitor whom she sees as a “glorified butler.” The book closes with another fine tale, “In a Line to Get Out,” which centers on Henry Blackman, who’s waiting at a train station for someone’s late arrival. He’s just one person in a crowd of people with their own problems, including an angry man demanding to speak with a manager and the lady impatiently waiting in line in front of him.
Subdued but often incisive portrayals of everyday lives.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781944527020
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Natural Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
