A meandering campus novel about finding one’s place in a crucial moment in history.
A college pitcher is caught between baseball and Nixon-era campus politics in Puszykowski’s debut novel.
John Light walked onto his baseball team at his small Michigan college suddenly in possession of an impressive fastball that had eluded him during his high school career. Now he’s in his senior year and the team has a real shot at winning the league championship. John should be excited, but he’s discontent. The philosophy and politics he’s been reading about at night—unrelated to his pharmacy major—have been exposing him to new ideas, helping him to see the flaws in America and its institutions, and he’s beginning to suspect some sort of youth-led revolutionary change might be necessary. Even though it’s 1972, conservative Wrencher College hasn’t yet felt the spirit of the 1960s. “Every year brought more long hair, more beards, more flared, torn jeans, more tie-dye, more beads, and more flannel shirts, but no groups organized to spread information or employ rebellious energy like everywhere else on the planet,” John narrates. “Wrencher was a time bubble stuck ten years in the past.” As John starts to attend peace rallies and demonstrations, he gets connected to a network of student activists, at Wrencher and elsewhere, who are willing to go to extreme lengths to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, his well-meaning coach’s efforts to secure the team the championship are undermined by the players’ antics, immaturity, and penchant for distraction. When the opportunity arises for John to put his politics into action, he must decide which rules he is willing to break, and what it will mean—for himself and for his team—when he breaks them.
Puszykowski is an adept writer, particularly about baseball. Here, John imagines a fireball moving through his body as he throws a pitch: “As I pushed forward to pitch, it rode up my thrusting thigh muscles, entered my twisting hips and into my upper torso as I opened up, shot through my pitching arm as it whipped forward, crackled through the snap of my wrist, and sparked out from my fingers as they propelled the baseball: powerful, rhythmic and fluent.” But the combination of baseball and radical campus activism makes for a sometimes overwhelming baby boomer cocktail—all 46 chapters are named for popular songs from the era, including “Bad Moon Rising,” “Instant Karma,” and “What’s Going On?” At one point, John and his catcher discuss Beatles lyrics: “I thought of how music can bring people together, like at Woodstock, ya know? That’s what this team needs, to pull together.” Puszykowski doesn’t seem to know much more than John does about what to do with this moment of cultural upheaval, failing to establish why it might be important or what any of it has to do with college baseball. The result is a narrative without much incident and a narrator too ambivalent and reserved to really carry a novel with his voice alone. The story is believable and successful at capturing a common experience of adolescence, but it is not always compelling.
A meandering campus novel about finding one’s place in a crucial moment in history.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798350956597
Page Count: 296
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
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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