A fresh, engrossing tale of a misfit kid pitting his dreams against an unforgiving society.
A sensitive, gay teen confronts the hostility of almost everyone he meets in Chicago in this coming-of-age novel.
Fifteen-year-old Seamus O’Grady just wants to be himself: slightly effeminate but stridently profane; obsessed with punk rock; immersed in edgy writers, from William Blake to Henry Miller; and desperate to escape from Chicago to London to become a celebrated playwright. Unfortunately, his White, Irish Catholic neighborhood and Jesuit high school—St. Xavier’s, to which he travels on the 85A bus—still persecute those traits in 1989. Gay-baiting and bullying by classmates and his parents make him attempt suicide by car exhaust. He’s even rejected by other outcasts: Punk scenesters deride his Johnny Rotten impression as hopelessly passé, and he’s savagely beaten by skinheads who steal his hat. On the meager upside, he’s a born actor, his drama teacher says; his psychiatrist is supportive; and he has a friend in Tressa, a Black, bald actress, artist, dancer, and physics whiz who intimidates the skinheads with her imperturbable moxie. Unable to return Tressa’s advances, Seamus fantasizes about going to Britain with Colby, a charismatic punk with whom he had a single, riveting encounter months ago. Smith’s yarn feels like an updated The Catcher in the Rye, with Seamus matching Holden Caulfield’s alienation and angst. Seamus is also, like many teens, callow, grandiose, snobbish, and overwrought. (“Its eyes are so startled, you’d think it’d actually been alive long enough to see what a fuckin’ horrible world this is,” he observes of a fetal pig in biology class.) The melodramatic novel somewhat uncritically endorses Seamus’ immature dudgeon, given the over-the-top hate he gets from other characters. Still, the author is a gifted writer who skillfully deploys energetic, evocative prose. His panorama of Chicago is grungily atmospheric—“Two large Latinas shrieked and ear-pierce-belly-laughed over Schlitz cans as they sat on stools, talking Spanglish on the front fire escape”—and Seamus’ arresting voice indelibly conveys the wounding loneliness of adolescence. (“I was going to do my usual thing of shuttling my ass, all alone, up and down the stairs between the main floor and video room” at a club, “wishing I had someone to talk to, wishing I knew people.”) Seamus isn’t the wisest of heroes, but many readers will see themselves in him.
A fresh, engrossing tale of a misfit kid pitting his dreams against an unforgiving society.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935098-26-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bascom Hill Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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