A snappy first-person voice, charming chaos, and plenty of Manhattan atmosphere make this debut a standout.
It’s tough enough being a hapless 20-something without having a global pandemic tempt you into becoming a luxury-apartment squatter in Manhattan.
Twenty-six-year-old Maya works as a stager for a beautiful, slightly oblivious designer named Athena. In an opening worthy of the movie Bridesmaids, Maya leaves a mess in a showcase penthouse. “Soaps are my forte,” says Maya, but her heart’s not in the high-rise game. Flashbacks to art school and her friendship with fellow student Clarissa take up more real estate in her head than her actual job. Athena has chosen one of Clarissa’s stunning paintings for the place, a painting so accomplished it makes everyone else’s work look lackluster in comparison—including, alas, Maya’s. Maya’s own medium turns out to be not paint, but puppets, which she makes from found materials and for which she creates distinct identities and voices: “My instructors called them puppets. Yes, they were human-like figures that I held on my hand and made speak in funny voices, but they were more. They were themselves avatars of the universal forces of transformation…in meta-territory, crafting dynamic sculptural reflections on Self.” After avoiding Clarissa’s first gallery show, she boxes up her creations and shoves the box in the bedroom closet of her Queens apartment, convinced she’s not meant to be an artist or an artist’s friend. She satisfies herself with the staging gig, booty calls with a nice enough fellow former art student named Craig, and admiring Clarissa’s superb work from afar. However, it’s late 2019 and then early 2020, and more and more conversations are revolving around a “big bad virus”; Maya decides there’s no harm in staying in the penthouse to ride out the Covid-19 quarantine. Before she manages to eat and drink all the supplies, Craig, then others—including her unhappily married sister—have joined her in a somewhat madcap but totally interesting ménage à many. Yes, that friendship with Clarissa, as well as Maya’s creative spark, will re-emerge, but the joy of this novel lies in its back-and-forth between aspects of Maya’s life and all her penthouse mates.
A snappy first-person voice, charming chaos, and plenty of Manhattan atmosphere make this debut a standout.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781953002822
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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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