A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.
In Rosenholtz’s epistolary novel, a desperate man reveals his psychological unraveling across a series of fan letters to Taylor Swift.
An unnamed 53-year-old high school English teacher and self-avowed music snob is shocked when he discovers how deeply he enjoys the Taylor Swift album Red (Taylor’s Version), which he listens to accidentally one day on his commute to work—his 13-year-old daughter, Allie, loves TS, of course, but the man is shocked that the music of the pop star speaks to him on such an elemental level. Soon he is listening to nothing else, declaring his car a “TS-only zone” in which his daughters’ other musical requests are not allowed. He embarks on what he calls the “Year of TS,” listening to Swift’s albums in chronological order and assimilating them into his being. “And then there’s Folklore—to be honest, I don’t even say the album’s title aloud, just as I never let my students say ‘Macbeth’ when we’re reading Shakespeare’s Scottish play,” gushes the man, who, because the novel is formatted as fan letters, always addresses Swift in the second person. “I feel unworthy of passing the word through my lips. The most perfect of your perfect albums.” By the time Midnights arrives in the fall of 2022, the man is so obsessed that he stays up until 3 a.m. to download the bonus content despite having to teach the next day. As he recounts his love for Swift’s music, the deleterious effects of his obsession on his life—from his work to his ability to drive to his relationship with his daughters—are increasingly apparent. The letters become more unhinged as time goes on, revealing the desperate fears and irrational dreams of a man on the edge of oblivion.
The author’s narrative voice is deviously comic, with glimmers of mania shining through the generally polite and friendly prose: “Sometimes, your music has even resulted in me losing my temper just a little, typically when anything or anyone comes between me and my enjoyment of you. I tend, for example, to yell quite vigorously at the woman with the disembodied voice who lives deep inside my car’s sound system whenever she interrupts the soothing sounds of your voice.” As the narrator discusses the fact that he and Swift share a birthday or speculates as to whether or not she has read Kurt Vonnegut, the sad realities of the narrator’s life are slowly revealed, such as how his wife kicked him out of the house and how his daughters are embarrassed that he cries whenever certain TS songs come on. Rosenholtz skillfully deploys the phenomenon of fandom—and Taylor Swift fandom in particular—to paint a detailed portrait of a lost soul for whom obsession serves as a kind of life jacket. The premise is a fun one, but it is slightly one-note; though the novel extends to only 220-odd pages, the idea loses some of its steam before the end. Perhaps because the narrator is ultimately so difficult to relate to, the book ends up feeling more like a lengthy black-humor piece than a work of psychological fiction.
A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798988180920
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Demersal Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 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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