A big-hearted consideration of gentrification and the erosion of time.
In Green’s satirical novel, a colorful Atlanta journalist covers a chaotic summer in his embattled neighborhood.
Archie Johnson is not God, though people call him that. The nickname has to do with his flowing silvery mane, long white beard, unplaceable ethnicity, and big personality. The freelance journalist writes primarily for the Atlanta Beacon, but he’s obliged to take any work he can find to keep his ancient home from falling apart. God inherited the Queen Anne–style house from his racist white grandfather, who allowed the property to fall into ruin after fleeing for the suburbs decades ago. That the house sits in the heart of the now predominantly Black neighborhood of Sweetberry Park is just a happy irony. God—a light-skinned man with one-quarter Nigerian ancestry—sees himself as both scribe and protector of Sweetberry Park, a role that has renewed his life’s purpose following the long-ago tragic death of his wife and young son. God has his work cut out for him in the summer of 2018 as the neighborhood is beset not only by a new project from millionaire developer Lawrence “Lotto” Livingston, but also by a literal plague of snakes—the 17 deadliest species available at the nearby zoo, released into the neighborhood by a deranged zookeeper. With the help of a former blues singer with deep roots in the neighborhood, can God save some of Atlanta’s history—and his own—from getting erased? Green’s voice-forward prose, as narrated by God, is inflected with enthusiasm and regret for what Atlanta was, is, and will become. He bemoans sitting in traffic on the “fifty-lane freeway monster of perpetual immobility, our city’s source of constant constipation,” remembering when he was a boy, when they “laughed at its unbridled fattening and the notion that people from exotic places like Jersey City, Portland, and Topeka would ever consider migrating to our baby metropolis.” Atlanta residents will get the most out of this hyperlocalized story, but the issues Green’s tale touches upon—housing, race, migration, grief, and the changing face of cities—are familiar all over.
A big-hearted consideration of gentrification and the erosion of time.Pub Date: March 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781958861523
Page Count: 364
Publisher: The Sager Group LLC
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2025
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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