A witty, satirical spoof of a cynical physician’s transformation.
A curmudgeonly doctor struggles to keep his job in this farcical novel.
Family physician Jones takes a lighthearted, satirical approach to health care through comical characterization by way of egomaniacal Dr. Camus, the most hated figure at Code Blue Memorial Hospital of Her Motherly Excellence. With a cantankerous demeanor and a diminutive stature, the notorious “scabrous predator” gives new meaning to career burnout. He’s become the hospital’s worst nightmare, slinging callous insults at staff and patients alike while misdiagnosing anyone in his care with rare maladies he finds on Wikipedia. Not the product of childhood neglect or an unfortunate addiction, Camus is “simply a jerk” who “kept showing up after his residency ended.” Obnoxious to a fault, he has alienated nearly all of the hospital staff and couldn’t care less about the consequences, calling his patients “relentless and annoying.” This behavior doesn’t go unnoticed by the hospital’s administration, particularly the medical center’s CEO, whose hands are tied with budgetary constraints restricting him from terminating Camus. Efforts to curb the doctor’s toxic and abusive bedside manner amount to assigning a “Censor,” who shadows his every move, bleeping out spewed expletives. But could a one-month work suspension and a mandatory intensive session with infamous behavioral hypnotist the Amazing Ralph be Camus’ saving grace? While Jones has conjured a premise that’s certainly ridiculous and preposterous, the book is hilarious, with scene after scene of outrageousness (at one point, an exasperated Camus even ejects a wheelchair-bound patient into the flower garden on the side of the hospital). Recounted by a humble, omnipresent narrator with a wry sense of humor, the story revolves around Camus as attempts to dilute his nastiness only amount to a whole new set of problems. Quite a departure from the author’s debut memoir, Fallible (2020), about the struggle to navigate mental illness as a clinician, this novel is compact, effortlessly amusing, and seemingly written with readers’ funny bones in mind. This story demonstrates Jones’ wild versatility as an author and will likely attract the readers who enjoyed his candid memoir.
A witty, satirical spoof of a cynical physician’s transformation.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1685130909
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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