A taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that’s much more personal than he’d like.
An edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo.
Adam Zweig is a successful political writer in Washington, the veteran of a thousand think pieces. He’s in his late 50s, divorced, a man of regular habits. So, when he’s messaged by a young reporter on the trail of a D.C. mediasphere sexual-harassment scandal, the alarm bells tripped aren’t the loud and blaring kind. Mainly, he feels sorrow—the accused is Max Lieberthol, years ago Adam’s editor and mentor at a magazine that resembles the New Republic. Adam, a good progressive, initially hits a morally tutting tone (how could Max have been foolish and vain enough to proposition a staffer?), but there’s sympathy underneath. He’s disappointed, but he wonders: A story like this, about an offense two decades old, committed in a kind of prelapsarian boys-will-be-boys era by an aging lion whose magazine has always had a big reputation, but (after all) a small readership—even in the age of social media, what legs can such a story have? Then—and Kalfus masterfully persuades us that the withholding is not reader-deception but self-deception—Adam begins to recall and recount the context. The accuser, Valerie Iovine, was his closest friend in the office, and Adam was present, outside Max’s office, when the incident occurred; Valerie told Adam about it immediately afterward, and he helped to console her. Adam feels duty-bound to confirm that Valerie is telling the truth, and this—he wants us and himself and most of all Valerie to believe—is an act of characteristic rectitude. The book’s steadily mounting tension derives from what comes next, as circumstance and Valerie herself require him to excavate more thoroughly his relationship with her, a friendship that grew into a professional intimacy and that then (in Adam’s way of seeing it) turned briefly romantic soon before—this having nothing to do with him!—Valerie withdrew from Washington and disappeared into the exile of small-city journalism.
A taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that’s much more personal than he’d like.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781571315755
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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