A good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.
A deadpan spoof of international thrillers, complete with a megalomaniacal supervillain, a killer robot, a damsel in distress, and math problems.
One never knows what to expect from Everett, whose prolific fictional output over the last four decades includes Westerns (God’s Country, 1994), crime novels (Assumption, 2011), variations on Greek mythology (Frenzy, 1997), and inquiries into African American identity (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009). This time, Everett brings his mordant wit, philosophic inclinations, and narrative mischief to the suspense genre, going so far as to appropriate the title of an Ian Fleming thriller. Its nonplussed hero/narrator is a mathematics professor at Brown University who calls himself Wala Kitu. It turns out he’s the grown-up version of Ralph Townsend, the genius child in Everett’s novel Glyph (1999), who retains everything while determined to say nothing. Indeed, “nothing” is the recurring theme (or joke) of Everett’s latest, beginning with its title and continuing with the meaning of both Wala (nothing in Tagalog) and Kitu (nothing in Swahili). “Nothing” also appears to be the major objective of one John Milton Bradley Sill, a “slightly racially ambiguous” self-made billionaire who declares to Wala his ambition to be a Bond villain, “the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy.” John Sill offers Wala a hefty sum ($3 million) to help him rob Fort Knox just as the eponymous baddie of Fleming’s Goldfinger tried to do. Wala’s not sure whether Sill’s joking or not. But the money’s big enough to compel him to tag along as Sill goes through the motions of being a supervillain, stopping along the way in places like Miami, Corsica, Washington, D.C., and, eventually, Kentucky. Wala’s accompanied throughout by his faithful one-legged bulldog, Trigo, and a math department colleague named Eigen, who at times seems to be literally under Sill’s spell but is almost as vexed by the nefarious goings-on as Wala. Being stalked throughout by Gloria, a comely, deadly Black android with an on-again, off-again Afro, doesn’t ease their anxieties. Everett is adroit at ramping up the tension while sustaining his narrator’s droll patter and injecting well-timed ontological discourses on...well…nothing. It may not sound like anything much, so to speak. But then, neither did all those episodes of Seinfeld that insisted they were about nothing. And this, too, is just as funny, if in a far different, more metaphysical manner.
A good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-208-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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