Glittering and gut-wrenching.
Paradigms shift in the wake of a supposedly indestructible superhero’s defeat in this sequel to Hench (2020).
Once a low-level henchwoman for hire, Anna is now a full-fledged villain called Auditor who serves at the right hand of Leviathan, the world’s biggest supervillain. Auditor’s superpower is weaponizing data to ruin superheroes’ lives—everything from publicizing secret social media accounts and marital infidelities to exploiting childhood traumas and deep-seated insecurities. Now that the world’s greatest superhero, Supercollider, has been vanquished—secretly twisted into a living, breathing “flesh dumpling” by his scorned ex-girlfriend and former superhero partner, Quantum Entanglement—Auditor yearns to use her talents to take down the Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka “the Draft.” The organization is responsible for everything involving superheroes, including recruiting, training, and funding them, as well as creating compelling backstories for them, and Auditor considers it to be the only remaining enemy worthy of her and Leviathan’s attention. But though Auditor has no shortage of diabolical plans, Leviathan refuses to greenlight any of them, as he’s too distraught over the defeat of his nemesis by someone else to even leave his lair. Then Supercollider perishes during doctors’ attempts to “untangle himself from himself,” and the Draft falsely blames Leviathan for his murder. On the plus side, burnishing Leviathan’s infamy snaps him out of his funk; it also paints giant targets on the backs of those working for him, few of whom are “conveniently invulnerable” like their boss. Further worrying Auditor is evidence of new leadership in the Draft—a marketing executive whose flair for manipulation rivals her own. Walschots’ plotting dazzles and devastates, with rollicking, high-stakes action punctuating scenes of unflinching introspection and fraught interpersonal drama. Via Auditor’s snarky yet vulnerable first-person narration and keenly rendered characters, Walschots sensitively explores issues of agency, self-identity, morality, and grief while entertaining readers from the jump.
Glittering and gut-wrenching.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780063236936
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
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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