A bold reengagement with the novel’s time-tested staple subject: romantic love.
A 20-something Brooklynite remakes the form and function of love in this story told in rhyming couplets.
The speaker of this novel in verse is, at first, enviably settled in her life. She enjoys her job teaching composition; she loves her boyfriend; she feels “if not exactly pride, at least the pretty, / riskless pleasure of conformity.” Then she meets an electrifying woman who sweeps her into a tumultuous, explosively erotic relationship. Through a series of discrete stanzas, themselves portioned into rhyming couplets, the speaker narrates the dissolution of her relationship with her boyfriend and the charged early months of her new love affair, which vivifies all the quotidian objects of her life even as it plunges her into sincere mourning for all that was lost in the breakup with the man she “revered / but felt [she] had been failing many years.” The author’s formal choices underscore the thematic obsessions of the book. The rhyming couplets create conversations within themselves, each line echoing the other’s language in sonic duets reminiscent of the ways couples reflect each other’s identities. The conceit is clever, and the verse itself is full of startling, effervescent imagery—not to mention full-throated eroticism—that is a pleasure to read. However, the only fully realized character in this tightly controlled exploration of identity and desire is the speaker herself. Perhaps this is the result of the form, which reflects the boyfriend and the lover as elements of the speaker’s own voice; perhaps it is a more deliberate flattening, illustrating the speaker’s statement that “love / has been, above all things, the engine of / self-knowledge in my life.” Regardless, the relentless interiority restricts the reader’s engagement to only those things that illustrate the speaker’s blooming selfhood. All other characters become symbols of the speaker’s progress through her journey of self-realization rather than people in their own rights. Which leaves the reader to ask how much more real or nuanced our narrator could have seemed if the characters that accompany her transformation were afforded the same ability to look into their own mirrors.
A bold reengagement with the novel’s time-tested staple subject: romantic love.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374607951
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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