A chilling, flawlessly executed, and emotionally taxing portrayal of a broken psyche.
A man addicted to social media depicts his frightening reality in Sarvas’ unsettling novel.
“I have nowhere to go, and too much to hate right in front of me,” announces the narrator, explaining why he walked away from his life in order to spend his days in a dark room, naked and glued to his computer screen. It’s not a sense of online community that keeps UGMan (his Twitter handle) from engaging with the real world (in fact, he calls other perpetually online users “mouthbreathers”); he is instead driven by compulsion and a deep-rooted anger at perceived enemies like a right-wing, bow-tied commentator or a duplicitous senator, just two on his ever-growing list of “Those Who Must Die.” Over the course of UGMan’s different tirades, narrative threads emerge, including unhappy memories from his childhood, the loss of his daughter and wife, and his ill-fated time playing guitar in a cover band—but UGMan’s reflections on the real-world connections he has lost are constantly punctuated by notifications pulling him back to the virtual. The senator he hates dies (“Much speaking ill of the dead, I note with approval,” he observes), and the right-wing commentator goes missing. Could this all have something to do with the only person ever to like one of his tweets? Is the FBI really looking for him, or did his sleep-deprived brain imagine that? UGMan never quite earns the reader’s sympathy, but Sarvas certainly earns respect for the stunning complexity of his protagonist—UGMan’s narration achieves great highs of wit and literary reference before plummeting down to the most basic references and internet-speak. That same rollercoaster is reflected in his fractured psychology; as UGMan ricochets from self-aware to complete delusion and paranoia, the reader also starts to question reality. The novel boldly avoids following any of the more predictable plot threads developing on the periphery of UGMan’s perspective—Sarvas has made UGMan’s acerbic mind the primary focus. It is a striking creation, but the novel’s relentless intensity leaves little room for readers to feel anything other than despair. As UGMan himself says, “It’s all quite unpleasant, isn’t it?”
A chilling, flawlessly executed, and emotionally taxing portrayal of a broken psyche.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9798988282983
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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