Readers vote "Whidbey" by T Kira Madden as the March book for Club Calvi
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The votes are in, and Club Calvi has a new book!
"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden was selected as the new Readers' Choice. The novel, Madden's debut, is about three women connected by a man who abused two of them when they were children. He's murdered after he's released from prison.
Madden told readers in a video message:
""Whidbey" opens when we meet one of our three main characters, Birdie Chang, on a ferry boat to Whidbey Island, where she meets a stranger who offers to kill the man who abused her as a child and who has recently been released from prison. Soon after, we learn that the abuser has been murdered. There's a mystery at its center, but "Whidbey" is a book about revenge, the revenge fantasy, the carceral and criminal justice system, and female rage."
You can read an excerpt and get the book below. There's also a link to our Facebook book above, which you can join and read along with the Club.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden
From the publisher: Birdie Chang didn't know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She's a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend's eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who's now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution and plan for revenge.
But Birdie isn't the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There's also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book's spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin's loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.
Calvin's death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers.
T Kira Madden lives in Hudson Valley, New York.
"Whidbey" by T Kira Madden (ThriftBooks) $23
Excerpt: "Whidbey" by T Kira Madden
Note: This excerpt references instances of abuse, including child sex abuse, though it is not rendered in any graphic detail.
I'd been trying not to think about the next hearing in Florida, end of summer. Every year I flew down to renew the order of protection against Calvin, which would soon be expiring again. Trace would be there, as always. My mother would be there, as always. As always, we would stay in the taupe hotel, eat the watery room service, and I would wear the used, pin-striped clothes borrowed from my mom's co-worker Abby, clothes that read responsible, ladylike, trustworthy, ecstatically bland. Early in the morning, we'd drive to the courthouse. The sun would blaze the limestone steps. And once inside, I would repeat the facts, because one has to both submit them and recite them aloud to a room full of strangers: I was nine years old when Calvin Boyer molested me and recorded it on a camcorder, nine years old when my parents pressed charges, ten years old when those charges were dismissed; Boyer, now a habitual felony sex offender, continued to abuse young girls, and some girls, girls like Linzie, were offered action, consequences, reverence; Boyer is mentally unwell; he is in and out of jail, prison, and community control; he once lived under the Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge, and he now resides at Gateway to Grace, a civil commitment treatment program for pedophiles; Boyer has continued to initiate contact, has professed his love, has threatened to find me anywhere, has always, and will always, find me—these facts printed on my flimsy sheet of paper, my body, as always, on the left side of the cold, carpeted room with all the other women (sometimes, a single man) and the stupid video looping on the bulky television that hasn't been updated since the invention of television about spousal abuse, domestic violence, the gifts of intuition, while actors on the TV dramatically play us—the disempowered victims—cowering and screaming, hands over our ears, ducked in a corner of a staged dark living room, always behind a couch, makeup too blue and streaking, and one by one, we approach the judge, a judge who is bored, a judge who sits unmoving and unmoved, thinking about his leftover meat sauce and four p.m. vodka waiting at home, and we wait for our verdict, for any recognition that might faintly change our lives, the only sound our stomachs, all of our stomachs gurgling, squelching with ache and with hunger like a thousand rusted, closing doors, while, on the right side of the room, our abusers sit stunned, drop-jawed, feigning remorse, feigning surprise, desultory stares of I don't know where she got this! Get a load of this one! waiting for the moment it's all over, the papers stamped and handed back, so often No, so often No reasonable person would feel threatened or This threat is not explicit, work it out already! or the alternative: a dull date of time allotted, our names no longer names but serial numbers, the countdown until the next renewal, before the mass of us exit the same courtroom and walk the same halls, which are never divided between perpetrator and victim, they wait until we leave, wait until we're back outside, the sun still striking beautifully those courthouse steps, all twenty-three steps, where the person who wants to kill us might, at last, be free to.
Calvin hadn't shown up last time. The two times before he had, dressed in the same oversized royal blue suit, his face clean-shaven and older, his whole body clutching for his mother, Mary-Beth, a jerky-tanned tiny blonde with puffy veins up her arms, who walked him down the hall, kissed him between the eyes, and said, I believe in you, baby.
Excerpted from Whidbey by T Kira Madden. Copyright © 2026 by T Kira Madden. Reprinted with permission from Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers.