An engaging, chatty, and meandering tale about the ways people make sense of the world.
A TV reporter tries to track down one of America’s greatest hoaxes in this comic novel.
Cooperstown, New York, 2003. The Cardiff Giant has been a local oddity of upstate New York ever since it was unearthed from a farmer’s field in 1869. Though the 10-foot-tall petrified man was quickly discovered to be a hoax, it remains a popular attraction at Cooperstown’s Farmers’ Museum—at least until it mysteriously vanishes. As part of his new position as a reporter for the Discovery Channel, Jack Thrasher is sent to investigate the disappearance, and he’s making a point to leave his skepticism at the door. “Enlightenment was bad for ratings,” explains Jack. “Let the ordinariness of life give way to the extraordinary, the marvelous—the paranormal!” In that spirit, he’s dutifully recording all the out-there theories of the locals, even when they propose that the giant came back to life or was abducted by aliens. But as Jack settles into the village, he soon begins to realize that the giant is hardly the weirdest thing about Cooperstown, a place replete with cabalists, astrologers, devotees of plant spirit medicine, and even a ravioli bearing an incredible resemblance to Mel Gibson. Can Jack get to the bottom of this disappearance without diving headfirst into the realm of the absurd? Lockridge’s prose is humorous and rich with detail, particularly regarding the history of the town and its oddities. At one point, Jack relates: “I got locked into the Baseball Hall of Fame after hours. I’d fallen asleep in the men’s room at closing. I was so battered, poisoned, and bitten since arriving in Cooperstown—and pumped so full of antibiotics, emetics, valium, and anti-inflammatories—that I wasn’t steady on my feet and was prone to narcosis.” The text is accompanied by stylish, black-and-white illustrations by Scanlon (who also provides the striking cover art). The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace, and there is a lot more banter than there are dramatic incidents or moments of high tension. The author is ultimately most interested in investigating the strange beliefs that animate people. Those who are similarly curious will find much to enjoy here.
An engaging, chatty, and meandering tale about the ways people make sense of the world.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77180-424-0
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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