An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.
A Malaysian immigrant in New York embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her husband walks out on her.
Edwina comes home one day from her exhausting job at a New York tech company and finds that her husband, Marlin, has gone missing. He’s been acting strangely for months now, ever since his father died, talking about “spirit guides” and wielding a crystal pendant. Edwina just wants her old Marlin back, the logical engineer who complemented the liberal arts major in her perfectly. When she eventually does track him down—he’s crashing at a friend’s place in Queens—he refuses to even look at her, much less talk to her. To make matters worse, things at work are going poorly: She’s the quality assurance analyst—and the only woman—at a startup called AInstein, which is creating a joke-telling robot. When she informs the oblivious or downright boorish software engineers that their robot’s jokes are sexist, she’s told to focus on her own job. But time is running out on her and Marlin’s work visas; they need their employers to sponsor their green cards or they’ll have to return to Malaysia or become undocumented. And Edwina is trying to hide everything from her mother, a judgmental woman who constantly criticizes her for being fat. Amid all this, Edwina reconsiders everything she thought she knew: her identity, her relationships, and her feelings about her adopted country. Chin’s novel is littered with genuinely funny moments; Edwina’s voice is a chatty, engaging one that belies her depth. “It wasn’t the first time I’d hoped for psychic transformation and ended with diarrhea,” she cracks after eating far too many Chicken McNuggets in an attempt to understand Marlin’s drastic change (he’s vegan, she’s vegetarian). The novel also presents a layered view of racism: Marlin is detained at a New York airport for his dark skin (he’s half Chinese, half Indian), while Edwina has a run-in with racist cops but gets away without injury. Malaysian culture, though, has its own “atmosphere of…poisons”: “In Malaysia I was supposed to go back to China. In America I was supposed to return to Malaysia. Was this progress? If I moved to China, would they tell me to piss off to America, thus resulting in some sort of infinite loop?”
An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-303068-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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