An intriguing vacation tale saddled with a lackluster protagonist.
A potentially ruined Wall Street executive takes a life-changing trip in this debut novel.
Julian Maslow has just been accused of embezzling over $6 million. He’s been suspended from the global investment firm at which he serves as operations manager, and he must now await the results of an investigation by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Frank Favara. The lawyer has already decided that Julian is guilty: Julian “had a month to protect himself from being tried for manipulating his position in a major bank’s operations to funnel money offshore to the Cayman Islands…If convicted, he would be put away for a reasonably uncomfortable amount of time and more than likely lose his income and family.” An amateur pilot, Julian jumps at the chance to fly his friend Gary Becker, head of CFK’s Prime Brokerage, to a golf outing in South Carolina. Gary is meeting a frustrated client there. If Gary can manage to convince him to stay, it will likely mean a major promotion. Julian is only going to distract himself from his potential downfall. Honestly, it’s the first vacation he’s had time to take in years. The trip becomes an aerial odyssey across the Southeast and as far afield as St. Thomas, taking Julian and Gary in and out of trouble while they question the motivations that drew them from humble origins to Wall Street in the first place. Along the way, there are steak dinners, desirable women, a night in the drunk tank, and an angry man with a gun. Did Julian steal the money? He tells everyone he didn’t, obviously, but can he be believed? As Julian soon finds out, his innocence—and guilt—isn’t quite as simple as whether or not Favara uncovers some wrongdoing, and at some point, he will need to come back down to earth.
Chesterton’s prose is sharp and evocative, particularly the dialogue, which captures the jocular, rapid-fire delivery that readers associate with Wall Street. Unfortunately, the descriptions are often overwritten, as here where Julian interacts with his alluring secretary: “Julian watched as her bright smile, usually a fixture on her face, slowly diminished as her eyebrows dove down, and she shot a glance over to him, and he knew who it was on the other end of the line. Her intuitive eyes furled, and a hint of red on her pearl-white cheeks revealed her dismay at what she was hearing.” The book is a midlife-crisis road novel that explores the hollowness of a career on Wall Street, and it has its moments of humor and circumspection. The use of the private plane is an inspired choice, both because of the elite access it provides the characters and because of the twist it brings to the traditional road trip. Even so, the tale generally suffers from simplistic and unsympathetic characters operating in an otherwise recognizable universe. Julian isn’t really likable or interesting enough to carry the plot, which eventually travels to some pretty dark places in order to redeem him. The story moves well and roams widely, but it never really finds an emotional spot to land.
An intriguing vacation tale saddled with a lackluster protagonist.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2021
ISBN: 979-8589354850
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2021
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
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