Like the Venetian candies in the last story, these intense little gems evaporate “like racy air.”
Nine stories take us into the world of people cooler and more attractive than we are.
Trendy bars, awards shows, political fundraisers, the right type of butter (Kerrygold), wedding table centerpiece (wildflowers in McCann's oatmeal tins), even the better side of the street (“the fine side of Bleecker, with the awnings and dachshunds”)—all the aspirational pleasures you could ever want are on offer in Taddeo's first story collection following her big nonfiction debut (Three Women, 2019) and a novel (Animal, 2021). People magazine may offer pictures of movie stars, but here we actually get to experience sex with one. In “Beautiful People,” a downtrodden prop master on a big movie set ends up, to her amazement, with the hottest man alive in her apartment, where he makes her veal osso buco and takes her to bed. “The first five hundred times it went in, it felt like the first time. There was no drug on earth, Jane knew, no man on earth, like this.” The dominant focus of the stories, however, is less relationships between men and women than the triangulation (or even quadrilateralization) of women around men. “American Girl” is about three women eyeing each other around the hot young senatorial candidate they all adore; “Maid Marian” is about the jealousy of an ex for her older lover’s wife. That former story contains a sentence that seems to crystallize the mood: “Noni was holding court with a few lesser-thans, in a corner with some Fernet and twinge.” Always the women are comparing bodies: “Fern was skinnier than Liv, but Liv was blond and tall and her breasts were enormous and thrillingly spaced.” “Back then, I think I had the better body. My butt and legs were more exciting.” This aggressively shallow approach is no accident—look what’s coming: “We would turn twenty-four and twenty-six and thirty. We would be leaving an acquaintance’s funeral—heroin, Cape Cod—and the dead boy’s father would turn to look at us, our rears. We've still got it, Sara would say. I laughed out loud, because I’d been thinking the very same thing.”
Like the Venetian candies in the last story, these intense little gems evaporate “like racy air.”Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982122-18-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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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