A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.
Russian immigrants in America ponder the meaning of life, navigate supernatural experiences, and search for lost treasure in Budman’s story cycle.
This collection centers on a man known only as “the interpreter of dreams and afflictions”—a semiretired, Russian-born Jewish engineer now living in Boston, where he works as an online medical interpreter for Russian-speaking patients. He and his unnamed wife, in their spare time, help care for their two young granddaughters. In these meandering stories, the interpreter recalls his family’s history in the Soviet Union, where they weathered persecution and exile; conveys gentle life lessons to his grandchildren; observes the medical melodramas of the patients; stages whimsical funerals for a goldfish and a tick; and, in the fraught title story, confronts a mass shooter at an immigrant community center. Some of his adventures are wondrous: He tries out a variety of eternal-youth potions but gets cold feet when he recalls how callow and selfish young people are; receives dream visitations from biblical patriarch Joseph, who dispenses terse advice; and hones his talent for floating up to the ceiling. Intertwined with his narrative is a subplot about Piotr Osipovich Voronin, a penniless Russian immigrant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, who hopes to recover priceless pearls hidden in ornate pillows that his aunt mailed to America, and Penelopa Belkina, a strapping young woman from Odessa, Ukraine, who uses her computer- hacking skills to help Piotr locate the pillows—in return for a hefty cut of the loot. Their quests introduce them to oddball Americans, including someone with a fair-sized arsenal who also collects teddy-bear figurines and an unemployed woman enduring the purgatory of job-search seminars. Eventually, the quest leads to the interpreter’s doorstep—after he buys one of the fateful pillows.
Budman crafts a story collection that reads more like a novella, exploring coherent, resonant themes, such as the exhilaration that immigrants feel regarding America’s opportunities and their bafflement at its alienating culture; the deep changes in perspective wrought by aging; and the uncertainties of attempting to communicate with and understand other people. His fictional world has a Dostoevskian feel to it; its characters are steeped in metaphysical rumination and spiritual yearnings, which lead to material calculations and occasional eruptions of shocking violence. Full of mordant wit, colorful characters, and disorienting swerves, Budman’s text brims with evocative detail when relating squalid realism—“He spent his fiftieth birthday the night before cursing his fate in heavily accented English, drinking stale Diet Coke mixed with a few drops of leftover vodka, munching on his last Triscuit,”—and bizarrely matter-of-fact magical realism: “The Green Man stands alone on the sidewalk of a new housing development where every house is at least half a million in Earth money….His eyes are undiluted anthracite with speckles of white. His skin is poison-green, the color that makes you think of an industrial spill.” The result is a dazzling read with true philosophical depth amid wild flights of fancy.
A set of captivating tales of strangers in a very strange land.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781604893342
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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