An intense exploration of a family shattered and reshaped by violence.
In Ripsman’s novel, a young teen and his family struggle with the repercussions of an unthinkable act.
The day before 13-year-old Manny Perlmutter’s bar mitzvah, his extended family—including both sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and Carrie, his older brother Evan’s girlfriend—all arrive for a celebratory dinner. Only Manny’s twin brother, Danny, who was killed in a school shooting the year before, is missing. In this somewhat overwritten but resonant portrait of a family in crisis, relationships are irrevocably changed and blame is attached to barely tolerated religious and political differences. Manny’s bitter mother, Pauline, blames her conservative husband for supporting “the policies that put the gun in that demon’s hands.” Manny’s ultra-conservative, pro-gun, Orthodox Jewish grandfather despises Pauline’s parents’ “humanism, their liberal assimilationism.” The characters’ expressions of these conflicting views verge on soapbox rhetoric, but, because they’re shaped by family and cultural history, they’re believably integral to the characters who hold them, examine them, and justify them (or not). The author departs from the family perspectives in the chapter titled “Echo Chamber,” which re-creates the usual reactions in the aftermaths of school shootings, from protestations of “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” to demands that Congress act. Most chapters alternate between various characters’ viewpoints, but Manny is always at the increasingly dysfunctional center, tormented by grief and guilt. Hidden in the classroom, he had listened as Danny, his parents’ golden child, died; burdened by this secret shame, Manny sometimes thinks it should have been him, and, shockingly, Pauline feels the same. This is strong stuff, undermined to some extent by infelicities in the prose along the way: Manny crouches “pusillanimously,” and Carrie’s dimples blossom “like the foliage all around her.” In a particularly off-putting formulation, Grandpa Morris pats Manny’s arm, “the loose, wrinkled skin of his hand flapping noisily on the boy’s taut pectoral.” Still, in the end, the narrative is moving: Manny’s father, Gary, decides to move forward with touching symbolism, and Carrie, who sees Manny’s distress most clearly, offers him comfort, confidence, and redemption.
An intense exploration of a family shattered and reshaped by violence.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9784824136510
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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