A workplace novel crossed with a soap opera, offering plenty of food for thought. (Organic and locally sourced, of course.)
Nothing and no one is very cooperative—especially the weather—in this novel about life in a Texas grocery co-op.
Wernersbach’s debut spends one very fraught week among the workers at the fictional Guadalupe Street Co-op in Austin. The novel opens on a Saturday in hurricane season, following store manager Roz, a queer woman who's deeply invested in her work. “For most of the staff, this was just a job. But do the simple math and jobs were most of the hours of a life. Roz had made a decision a long time ago, when she had no money and was putting on the red H-E-B staff shirt for the first time, that she could resent every second of her time on the clock, and her parents for cutting off her credit card, or she could claim a stake in the minutes of her own life by caring about what she did. The work was meaningful if you gave it meaning.” Shortly after Roz watches her ex-wife, a TV weather reporter, deliver the news of imminent gale-force disaster, noticing a huge new engagement ring on her finger, all hell breaks loose. The power goes out, customers panic, one of the cashiers is injured while forcing open the automatic doors…and we’re off. The unhappy, underpaid employees have already filed a petition to unionize, and Roz’s handling of this crisis will provide fuel for their fire. There are two other point-of-view characters: Randy, the 50-year-old nonbinary dairy manager, and Eleanor, the 69-year-old chief executive, who founded the store with a wealthy girlfriend 40 years earlier. Everybody’s hiding something: Randy’s messing around with Molly, Roz’s live-in partner, also an employee; Molly hasn’t told Roz about the petition; Eleanor’s keeping mum about her cancer diagnosis. Meanwhile, there’s more stormy weather ahead. Wernersbach’s depiction of their large, diverse, economically struggling cast of characters gives even the minor players their full humanity and their evocation of the Austin setting sparkles with verisimilitude, right down to the very affordable pitcher of Lone Star at the Spider House Café.
A workplace novel crossed with a soap opera, offering plenty of food for thought. (Organic and locally sourced, of course.)Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781685970536
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
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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