An old-fashioned-feeling issues novel focused on Black and queer lives, with a page-turner of a plot.
In the middle of the 20th century, a queer Black woman who can pass for white and lives as straight discovers the price of her shadow life.
A historical novel bursting with characters and decades of events begins with 18-year-old artist Odette Honore, who’s in love with a girl—something that’s unacceptable in her tightknit Creole community in 1944 New Orleans. But then her girlfriend, Hattie, asks Odette to do the unthinkable: Marry her brother before he goes off to war. Odette agrees, beginning her long tenure of living a lie. The novel’s leitmotif is passing; Odette is often treated as white and lives as straight, which inflicts catastrophic personal damage. Soon Odette is a pregnant widow and she, her sisters, and her sisters’ husbands move to Los Angeles to evade Jim Crow. The move is a success—they find neat houses in a middle-class Black neighborhood and management positions at Columbia Records. Then one day Odette finds her cousin Delphine Kelley raving in the street. Delphine, who left New Orleans to marry a white man and is passing in Los Angeles, is committed to an institution with schizophrenia, set off by “a denial of identity.” Although Odette is falling for co-worker Ginny, she must adopt Delphine’s daughter, and to do that, she must marry again. She chooses the closeted Felix, and their lavender marriage, raising her son and adopted daughter in a hillside bungalow, offers surprising comfort. The novel is rich with cultural references, including conversations about Patricia Highsmith and James Baldwin, the death of Emmett Till, and the Watts riots, offering a counterpoint to Odette’s own journey through experimentation, grief, and revolt. The unfortunate deus ex machina of a wealthy white friend who single-handedly advances Odette’s artistic career is offset by the novel’s sensitive examination of one woman’s hard-fought journey to self-acceptance.
An old-fashioned-feeling issues novel focused on Black and queer lives, with a page-turner of a plot.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781250810472
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
