An extraordinary, darkly comical story of flawed characters who both embrace and disregard the outside world.
In Burleigh’s satirical novel, artists in an upstate New York hamlet wallow in their soap-operatic lives as catastrophic floods close in on their village.
After friends of documentary filmmaker Drew Pierce remember him at his funeral, the narrative jumps back to the week before, when all their lives seemed relatively normal. In the flashback, Sal Hanford, a UNICEF documentarian, is having an affair, and her musician husband is apparently oblivious. But although her Californian lover is exciting, he can’t quite give her the warmth that she gets at home. Bliss St. Ours, who met her husband at art school, runs the Henderson Happy House—a camp for undergraduate art school students in Canawunk, New York; in practice, it seems more like a work camp to improve Bliss’ property (since residents paint walls, for example). Meanwhile, Drew’s wife, Grace, wants a divorce because he can’t overcome his OxyContin addiction, even after spending thousands of dollars on multiple stays in rehab. Everyone plans to attend a summer’s-end party at Bliss’ place, although a hurricane recently hit Florida, which promises heavy rain, flash flooding, and devastation to come. Burleigh’s engaging novel, set in 2012, is the second in a loosely connected trilogy. It teems with engaging characters, even when they’re self-serving and not especially sympathetic. For example, many worry about environmental issues, such as climate change and the BP oil spill, but they’re content with showing that concern solely through their art; one character, for instance, builds an ice polar bear and displays it in the desert in response to news of a melting glacier in the Arctic. Petty troubles amusingly take precedence over worries about devastating flood waters, even as meteorologists continually offer warnings. At another point, the narrative wryly paints Bliss as “too much of a feminist to concede that she’d strategically shot-gunned” her husband into marriage. Still, the author dives deep into individual psyches, which results in some hard-hitting revelations—such as Bliss and Sal being somewhat disheartened by motherhood, and the implication that Drew is an abusive domestic partner.
An extraordinary, darkly comical story of flawed characters who both embrace and disregard the outside world.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798218921705
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Four Sticks Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2026
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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