A surprisingly moving, piercingly effective parable about exorcisms of all sorts of demons.
A woman with little knowledge of her family history is visited by an ancient curse.
Castro returns to her sweet spot—layering folkloric monsters onto private trauma—for this generational ghost story. Even those who enjoy a straightforward horror tale may be dismayed by the sheer despair surrounding the titular Alejandra. Terrified by motherhood and depressed by her own self-loathing, she finds suicide whispering in her ear amid a cacophony of slurs like “Difficult woman. Sick woman. Dead woman.” An adoptee of Mexican descent who has only recently reconnected with her birth mother, Alejandra is isolated in an upper-middle-class ivory tower thanks to her absentmindedly cruel husband and three demanding children. Unaware of her family history, she imagines her demons to be illness, unchecked. We soon learn that Alejandra’s torture comes via La Llorona, a mythic woman who drowned her children and herself and now haunts the living as a banshee—or at least something primeval using the folk demon as a guise. As the wraith begins to appear in corporeal form to her children and birth mother, Alejandra finds a comrade in therapist Melanie Ortiz, who has a sideline as a curandera, a spiritual medicine woman. Castro’s remarkable balancing act juxtaposes the emotional turmoil of a bad marriage and depression against the very real and visceral horrors swirling around Alejandra, painting with dripping, peek-between-your-fingers menace. The story is also peppered with flashbacks from the 17th century forward, showing the demon’s trickery toward Alejandra’s ancestors and the fatal consequences that follow. There’s a lot to like here. For horror fans, there’s the palpable feeling of not believing one’s eyes added to the grotesquerie of the drowned fiend and a not inconsiderable amount of child endangerment. At a deeper level, Castro’s tale of a woman both asking for help and taking possession of her own spirit delivers cheerworthy moments of empowerment.
A surprisingly moving, piercingly effective parable about exorcisms of all sorts of demons.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780593499696
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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