The best thing that’s happened in the crowded world of Lewinskiana in a long time.
A woman revisits a troubling chapter in her past with the help of Saint Monica Lewinsky.
“Monica Lewinsky was born in 1973 to a noble family of Jews living in the American Empire. She grew up a beautiful and spirited girl and was given a rare position as a servant to the emperor in the heart of the imperial palace.” Langbein’s second novel opens with a brief biography of Monica Lewinsky written in the style of Lives of the Saints; similar lives of real female saints are interspersed throughout this complex comic confection. Saint Monica is invoked as a prelude to the story of Jean Dornan, a 45-year-old translator working in New York City’s court system. Jean has begun to be overwhelmed by memories of an affair she had with a professor in the summer of 1998, the same year as Monica’s fateful tryst. Before she knows it, the desperate woman is in the presence of a beatific Saint Monica, who guides her through a detailed re-examination of the six weeks she spent in France at an intensive study program on medieval art at age 19, told through flashbacks. She and Monica occasionally comment on the unfolding action. For example, when Jean, an accomplished cook, has the opportunity to make dinner for the other students and professors, she chooses lasagna. In her hands, this pedestrian dish is “a hot sarcophagus of deliciousness” that completely blows everyone away. “You’re a fucking genius,” Monica declares. Jean’s culinary skills get the attention of the handsome young scholar who’s leading the program, and things unfold in the way they often did in that era. In retrospect, Jean can see what an ambitious and gifted young woman she was, finally understanding that the way the scholar eventually punished her for what happened between them warped the course of her life. The final section of the book delivers a satisfyingly mythic resolution, continuing to interweave art historical and religious tropes into the story on multiple levels. Like Jean’s lasagna, the novel succeeds beyond expectations, its bold, clever comedic lineaments supporting a serious and poignant examination of female desire and male power.
The best thing that’s happened in the crowded world of Lewinskiana in a long time.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780385551502
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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