Smart, tough-minded, and passionate: a pleasure from start to finish.
Two Brooklyn women forge identities and careers in their rapidly gentrifying borough.
Narrator Alicia Canales Forten, an aspiring writer/director currently writing ad copy, is the offspring of a fleeting romance between her working-class Puerto Rican mother and a father from the Black elite who sees his daughter two weeks a year at his parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. La Garza is a Fort Greene legend for her fabulous parties and the impending initial public offering of her eponymous fashion label. At first Alicia can’t figure out why glamorous La Garza goes out of her way to befriend her, even if they’re neighbors in the funky area between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that houses many young people of color striving to get ahead. She soon learns that La Garza wants to reconnect with Alicia’s cousin Devon, a married Wall Streeter who was her first love. As in her previous two novels, Gonzalez trains a razor-sharp eye on class and racial distinctions, particularly in Alicia’s conflict over whether she really wants to marry her medical student fiancé and settle into the Black bourgeoisie, and in La Garza’s reckless affair with Devon. Longtime Brooklynites will enjoy recognizing the local businesses and landmarks Gonzalez name-checks, from Cake Man Raven to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower sign, but any reader can appreciate the authenticity of her salty voice and the changing cityscape it describes, as neighborhood landmarks are torn down to make way for condos and boutiques. Her bracing point of view animates a propulsive storyline strung with memorable characters, among them Devon’s buttoned-up wife, Marla (tougher than she seems), and shady, mobbed-up “stockbroker” Augusts Jankovskis, who has ulterior motives for financially backing La Garza. Devon’s sexy colleague, Matteo Jones, who tempts Alicia to forget she’s engaged, isn’t quite as interesting, but he supports the novel’s main mission: chronicling Alicia’s struggle to sort out who she is and what she wants, with her new friend La Garza as both role model and cautionary tale. Brilliant party scenes, tart dialogue, and dramatic plot developments further enrich this gripping work, another step forward for the talented Gonzalez.
Smart, tough-minded, and passionate: a pleasure from start to finish.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250372031
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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