A funny, smartly observant, and philosophical animal tale; a heartwarming read.
A pet dog and cat share their views on small-town life in this novella.
Ralph is an indefatigably curious pound puppy who joined his adoptive family when he was 6 months old. Murray is a savvy tortoiseshell cat who lives next door and just happens to be Ralph’s best friend. They live in 1950s Murfreesboro, a “quaint little hamlet…where there was never a need to lock your doors.” Written from Ralph’s perspective, the story shows the two animals poring over the minutiae of everyday life by reading each other’s thoughts. Ralph is a self-appointed head of security, watching over his family’s two young boys, Tommy and Ricky. He is eager to vet characters like Zeke, a storytelling vagrant the boys befriend while building a secret fort. Meanwhile, Murray is proud of virtually eradicating the mouse population on his side of the fence, but he still has time to learn new dance crazes, like the Twist. When Ralph and Murray get together, the scope of their conversations proves entertainingly limitless, from discussing Uncle Buck, who lives in an urn on the mantle, to the reasons humans have coins. The first-person (or perhaps first-canine) narrative does fine work of getting into a dog’s mindset. Canine owners will smile knowingly at Ralph’s behavior: “I broke up the boredom by shuttling back and forth between the two bedrooms. Snuggling into Tom’s bedspread, I watched him stare at books.” Glaze is a skillfully descriptive writer who effortlessly brings the world surrounding the animals to life: “Wintertime was fading, and a warm afternoon sun was beginning to coax the jonquils out of the ground along the fence line.” Ralph and Murray possess shrewd natures, which, when discussing matters such as using alligators for “shoes and belts,” allow them to pose questions that will make readers reflect on controversial human practices: “Is that mean, treating animals like that?” On other occasions, the pair’s innocence is endearingly hilarious: “ ‘Do you know what an Everglade is?’ I said.” “It’s air spray, right?” The author’s furry characters are thoroughly convincing and will immediately draw readers into a world where divebombing blue jays are among the biggest problems. The result is deliciously cozy escapism that simultaneously poses subtle yet pertinent questions about how readers live their lives.
A funny, smartly observant, and philosophical animal tale; a heartwarming read.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2024
ISBN: 978-1737295136
Page Count: 110
Publisher: ScreenShot Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2023
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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