Another slightly edgy “sad girl” novel, distinct in its inclusion of a nonbinary love interest and a celebrity cameo.
A depressed young woman attempts to form her identity through parasocial relationships, one of which she manifests into existence.
Elsa has been dumped by a chic older couple, her bosses and lovers of a year and a half. Heartbroken and out of a job, she moves back in with her parents in her sleepy hometown. The family watches an unnamed film together, which the discerning reader will quickly identify as Call Me by Your Name (2018), and Elsa finds that “she had been moved,” deeply, by the performance of the young actor—which would be, you guessed it, Timothée Chalamet. Elsa becomes obsessed with Chalamet, who’s referred to only as “the actor-character,” and in an extraordinary coincidence, she sees him at her town’s local coffee shop days later. He’s starring in a play in the town’s annual theater festival, and Elsa devotes herself to meek attempts at grabbing his attention from outside his retinue of haute creatives and hangers-on. Her life becomes a blur of hostessing at the local restaurant, stalking “the man and the woman” and various influencers on social media, smoking on the roof outside her childhood bedroom, and—briefly and unspectacularly—encountering the actor. Over time, her interests shift from the actor to one of his companions: a dark-haired person named Sam. When Sam finally notices her, Elsa must reckon with who she is, and who she could become, after hitting rock bottom. This debut is realistic in its portrayal of a listless young woman lacking direction, and some readers will find many moments to relate to. The endless repetition of actions and thought patterns that fill the first two-thirds of the book mirror the monotony of Elsa’s days, but they quickly begin to drag. We move through Elsa’s life as she does, sleepily, watching her emotions instead of feeling them. The style is formal and detached, which can feel stilted at times, but there are lines that shine with wisdom: “She wondered if progress or ‘healing’…was merely a flattening out, a ridding of affect so that one might remain placid in the face of almost anything, a pebble worn down to its impenetrable core.”
Another slightly edgy “sad girl” novel, distinct in its inclusion of a nonbinary love interest and a celebrity cameo.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668025109
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
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