Confrontational and often abstract, but grounded in real human emotion and experience.
A provocative French writer and filmmaker explores #MeToo, the fate of aging actresses, and addiction.
“Dude, screw your apologies, screw your monologue, screw everything: there’s nothing about you that interests me.” This is the opening line of Rebecca Latté’s email response to Oscar Jayack, a novelist who’s trying to apologize for a (since deleted) post in which he excoriated her for no longer being the same person—the same body—that boys like him once fantasized about. Despite her claim that Oscar is boring, Rebecca continues to reply to his emails, and the two develop a relationship that is vital to both of them and shaped not just by their shared working-class childhood, but also by the fact that Oscar’s older sister was Rebecca’s best friend back in the 1980s. There is a third party in this story: Zoé Katana, a feminist blogger who has publicly accused Oscar of sexually harassing her while she was assigned by his publisher to work as his publicist. This is an epistolary novel shaped by contemporary modes of communication, but it’s still an epistolary novel, which is not a forgiving form—or even a believable form, much of the time. Opinions about whether or not Despentes pulls this off depend largely on how much the reader enjoys listening to three hyperverbal, theory-inclined people talk to and at and over each other. That said, Despentes gives readers plenty of reason to stick around, beginning with Rebecca’s refusal to put up with Oscar’s shit. His response to being canceled after he’s outed as a sex pest is predictably self-serving, and his new confidante will have none of it. At the same time, Rebecca comes to see Oscar as a role model in sobriety. Meanwhile, she serendipitously connects with Zoé while Paris is locked down because of Covid-19, which complicates her relationship with Oscar. What makes this novel work as a novel—rather than a collection of rants presented as a novel—is that Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé come across as real people and their interactions with each other manifestly change them.
Confrontational and often abstract, but grounded in real human emotion and experience.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780374611613
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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