A charming and complex book full of intellect, humor, and—despite its title—romance.
An anti-romantic finds herself at odds with her own beliefs when she falls in love with not one, but two men.
Meyer’s provocative novel follows Sylvie Broder from her childhood in a New England town where “families agonized aloud about college but never tuition” into adulthood. Growing up at odds with her quiet and rule-obsessed parents, Sylvie was only allowed to be her loud, emotional, and messy self while visiting her joyful grandparents, who were Holocaust survivors. Then, in high school, she falls in love with “famously perfect” Jonah Sabransky. Over the course of an 11-year relationship that includes marriage, Sylvie submits herself to his increasingly cruel wants, needs, and desires—and becomes smaller and meeker with every passing year. When she finally leaves, she does so without a word. As she attempts to rebuild her life, Sylvie starts a philosophy Ph.D. program, seeks out one-night stands, and avoids Jonah’s endless emails. In both her life and her dissertation work, Sylvie dreams “of the world after romance,” because public-facing relationships kept “women from flourishing and corroded true love.” Her marriage not only completely leveled her life and relationships, but her belief in the concept of romance. These rigid beliefs are beautifully challenged when she meets two distinctly different men: sweet and understanding Robbie, who lets Sylvie be exactly who she is, and boisterous and family-centric Abie, who opens Sylvie up in ways she never knew possible. As she falls in love, she lets go of what she knows and begins to understand how she feels. Meyer has rendered Sylvie with such complexity that she’s able to garner empathy from the reader despite her selfishness and shortcomings. Steeped in current events and philosophical theory, the book also deftly explores abuse, monogamy, the #MeToo movement, Judaism, love, and power dynamics in and out of the bedroom. A less capable writer would stumble under the weight of the book’s intricate themes, but Meyer’s prose is both graceful and skillful.
A charming and complex book full of intellect, humor, and—despite its title—romance.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780593835142
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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