A slow-paced yet big-hearted satire.
In this comic fantasy, an aspiring writer accidentally creates a penguin-based religion, setting her at odds with her devout mother, a violent king, and the eccentric pantheon of gods her brainchild threatens to unseat.
On a mostly desert world where the sun no longer sets, a smattering of towns is ruled by a cruel, diseased king who plans to overthrow the Ageless, an immortal but largely absentee assemblage of deities. Since the death of her father in one of King Rulf’s many wars, Zeggara “Egg” East lives under the influence of her mother, the Holy Devoted Sarene, who wishes for her daughter to commit to worshiping the Ageless as she does. But Egg only wishes to be a writer. So Egg’s manuscript, Grand Teachings of the Almighty Penguin, is, naturally, a commentary on religion, where an eternal Penguin arrives in a village to teach the people how to be more “penguiny.” Much to her surprise, the story’s popularity births a new religion, Penguinism, and now a simple mother-daughter conflict threatens to hatch into a holy war. The timing couldn’t be worse for a religious crusade, as the leaders of the Ageless—the God of Creation and Goddess of Order—tell their family in a crystal heaven about their impending divorce and retirement. Equally worrisome, King Rulf has discovered the gods’ lethal seafood allergy, with only the God of Waste Management and the shameless yet sincere Jack-of-12-Trades named Trast to stop him. A fantasy comedy that swims in similarly madcap waters as works by Terry Pratchett and Christopher Moore, Massa’s novel coolly and deftly introduces a farcical setting that reflects the absurdity of today’s world, brimming with commentary on religion, capitalism, and writing. The book likes to play with language and puns, and Egg’s journey pokes fun at writers, readers, publishers, and more, though its appeal reaches far beyond wordsmiths and satirists. Unfortunately, the tale’s pacing could most fittingly be described as a waddle, its length making clever ideas like the Ageless’ seafood allergy and the Penguinists’ evolving and eclectic religious practices eventually grow tiresome. The author restates plot elements and Egg’s odyssey to keep the story moving. This distracts somewhat from one of the tale’s most intriguing themes: that moments of real kindness and connection between characters come not from humor, but rather the unexpected sharing of tragedy.
A slow-paced yet big-hearted satire.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8825594620
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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