An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.
In Land’s novel, a young man tries to access his spirituality with guidance from a teacher.
Uncanny events punctuate Gabe’s life: At 6 years old, his hand passes through a toy train he holds; a couple of years later, he floats in a vast abyss after his bedroom walls “[peel] back like layers of paper.” As the years pass, otherworldly events keep happening. Touching a heavy wooden bedframe with one finger, Gabe watches the bed easily slide over, and he walks away unscathed from the collision of his Mustang Mach II with an oncoming pickup truck. In a California coffee shop, searching for meaning in his life, Gabe encounters an older man, Elias, and feels “a hum of presence.” In subsequent meetings held in outdoor locations, such as parks, forest clearings, riverbanks, and meadows, Elias guides Gabe to an understanding of life as a game that we play many times. They consider figures who believed in themselves and overcame doubt, including Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Teresa, Wim Hof, and Elon Musk. After all the dialogues, the hardest work begins: Gabe has learned the rules, but must relinquish the fear and resistance that keep him from achieving full spiritual mastery. Gabe and Elias are the only two characters in this book, and little happens in each chapter aside from conversations. The characters don’t exactly sound like real people as they constantly grapple with elevated concepts such as the soul, god, and karma, but this seems intentional. Rather than inhabiting personalities, they embody roles: pupil and mentor. More conflict might have been beneficial to the story, however, as Gabe is exceptional from the start. Land’s vivid descriptions of nature add engaging flourishes, helping to ground readers between the volleys of intense dialogue; a park where Gabe meets Elias is a “mosaic of tall trees, swatches of green grass, and gravel paths that crunched underfoot.” The text may lead readers to other thinkers (a resource guide is available at the end) while also offering inspiration of its own; the author repeats the new ideas and rules Gabe learns in easy-to-understand, bullet-pointed lists.
An intriguing and informative dialogue that persuasively makes the case that we’re infinite beings.Pub Date: June 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798765262016
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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