Powerful, well-crafted short stories that sneak up on the reader to deliver a jolt.
A debut collection of short stories about illness, family, and sudden twists of fate.
Jones’ book disconcerts at first. The stories don’t seem to relate to one another, and a few are very brief, like “The Father” (less than two pages) and “The Short History of her Heart” (three paragraphs). Eventually, the themes and concerns overlap: Multiple stories follow Eleanor, who’s in late-stage cancer, and the repercussions of the fatal illness on her family. The collection also explores endings of various kinds. Relationships fall apart, people get sick and die, situations change. Another commonality is unexpected, even brutal, behavior. Two older women beat up a younger pregnant woman in “I’ll Go With You.” In “Realtor,” the main character snips off the tip of his nose with scissors in a misguided attempt to save his relationship. A car crashes into a living room in “Help Will be Here Soon,” and an estranged uncle shows a disturbingly keen interest in his almost 11-year-old niece in the violent “Thanksgiving.” Characters might try kindness, but their efforts are often futile. For example, in Eleanor’s family, “Everyone wanted to be the one whose job it was to keep the washrag on her forehead cold,” but holding the washrag is a one-person job, and it doesn’t help that Eleanor has a lump the “size of a grapefruit” (a fine example of the author’s wry humor and insight into family dynamics). Characters often lash out in the face of their helplessness, but even when they do awful things, Jones uses dark humor to convey their humanity. The power of the story collection creeps up slowly. At first, the writing style seems almost drab (“Her father died. My father left her. Her mother died. And we all grew up and moved away”). But the cumulative effect of these stories is intense, and the contrast between the understated writing and the shocking events works exceedingly well every time.
Powerful, well-crafted short stories that sneak up on the reader to deliver a jolt.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781958506639
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Zibby Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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