Welcome to summer reading season! To me, the main criteria for a great summer read is an immersive quality—you want to be able to lose yourself in the world of the book for hours at a time. Take Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler (Harper/HarperCollins, June 2): When I got an early galley by email a few months ago, I opened it right away—and then sat at my computer for the rest of the day until I had finished the whole thing. Not the ideal reading experience—it would have been much more fun to be lying on the beach!—but once I started, I didn’t have a choice: Sorry for the book review cliche, but I just didn’t want to stop.
Whistler opens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, notice an old guy following them around. He turns out to be Daphne’s former stepfather, Eddie Triplett, whom she hasn’t seen in more than 40 years. The story of how they reconnect is immediately gripping—you want to know these people, and to find out what happened to sever their close relationship when Daphne was 9. Our starred review calls the book “an evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.”
Perhaps you discovered romance this winter, falling down the Heated Rivalry rabbit hole like so many others. If you’ve gone through Rachel Reid’s entire Game Changers series, try Kennedy Ryan’s Score (Forever, May 19), the story of Verity and Monk, a screenwriter and musician who had a brief relationship a decade ago at a Georgia HBCU. Now they’re working together on a film and have to decide whether to trust each other again. Like Reid, Ryan sensitively portrays mental health issues—in this case, Verity’s bipolar disorder—as well as powerful yearning and truly sexy scenes. Our starred review says, “Ryan knows how to put her readers’ emotions through the wringer while staying true to her characters, so the story feels realistic and never manipulative.…Incredibly romantic and deeply human.”
Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect (Pamela Dorman/Viking, June 30) has the classic cover of a “New England in summer” novel: sand, surf, beach chairs, woman scrolling her phone. Wait, what was that last bit? Jackson presents an up-to-the-minute picture of love and betrayal among a group of friends in the same Massachusetts coastal town where Updike set his 1968 novel, Couples, and it’s a lot of fun—our review calls it “an acute portrait of midlife among millennials.”
The narrator of Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed (Tiny Reparations, June 23), is in hiding, somewhere, and it’s April 2020—the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She might as well make a podcast, beaming out her story of 10 years as a fugitive, having sold her highly coveted Singaporean passport when she could no longer use her real name. It’s a story of crime, family, identity, and secrets; our starred review calls it “an utterly original thieves’ confession you won’t be able to put down.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
