A wild ride and an immersive Chicago novel, in which the town threatens to toddle off its axis.
In the wake of the JFK assassination, another death shakes Chicago.
Before “true crime” and “cold case” became cultural bywords, the real-life mystery surrounding Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet obsessed her hometown. She was the 22-year-old daughter of Irv “Kup” Kupcinet, whose daily newspaper column and late-night TV gabfest had tagged him with the title “Mr. Chicago.” A struggling starlet since moving to LA, Cookie had experienced a series of setbacks—a shoplifting conviction, an abortion, a romantic breakup. When she was found dead in her apartment, was it suicide or murder? Could it have had something to do with the Kennedy assassination? The Kupcinets insisted there was foul play, though no suspects were charged and the case remains officially unresolved. Six decades later, the case is mostly forgotten, but it obsesses the narrator of this novel. Jed Rosenthal is a struggling author, academic, and father. He takes a deep dive into this mystery, at least partly because there’s so little else going on in his life. Plus, it’s personal for him—his grandparents had been best friends with the Kupcinets, until Cookie’s death. Another mystery? It seems that Jed has never forgotten nor forgiven the way the Kupcinets cut the Rosenthals off. Within the novel, literary allusions abound, from Chicago (including Saul Bellow, whose Humboldt’s Gift featured a fictionalized Kup) and beyond (James Ellroy in particular takes a beating). The novel also abounds with names that Chicagoans of a certain age will recognize, the sort of names so often boldfaced in Kup’s column. As Jed muses, “A friend of mine, a novelist, once said that minor characters don’t know they’re minor. Doesn’t this apply to us all?” Because all these characters are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Including Jed and Cookie. Even Kup’s luster has dimmed since his death. But in conjuring Chicago as it existed before he was born, Jed attempts to show how everything connects, how the pieces of this puzzle—his family’s and his city’s—might somehow fit together. And maybe even amount to something.
A wild ride and an immersive Chicago novel, in which the town threatens to toddle off its axis.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780316224659
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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