An innovative but uneven spiritual tale.
In this debut novel, an emperor establishes a clandestine order to protect and disseminate spiritual secrets that predate the birth of Jesus.
Aram is a nomadic trader traveling through ancient Syria. Isha, his caravan’s leader, encourages him to seek out the spiritual counsel of Murduk, a “silent observer of the universe,” who paradoxically turns out to be uncommonly garrulous and eager to impart his wisdom. Murduk shares with Aram a combination of cosmological and moral teachings, the former vaguely reminiscent of Christian eschatology. Apparently, the “ancient engineers of our species” have left instructions for their return, “when time and space interact in such a way as to open the stargate again.” In addition, there will a decisive battle between the forces of good and evil, which will “drive the planet into an obscure tunnel of death and devastation.” Aram is shown how to interpret the signs—the novel is filled with diagrams that illustrate the messages—and is given an amulet that contains a hexagram within a circle apparently encrypted with spiritual knowledge. The bulk of this tale is devoted to the aftermath of Aram’s spiritual enlightenment—he becomes a great prophet, and his legacy is continued by powerful men like Roman Emperor Traianus. Emperor Constantine eventually founds the Constantine Order devoted to the perpetuation of Aram’s work, and its illustrious membership includes Attila the Hun and Leonardo da Vinci. Consta makes this order the prime mover of world history—the Crusades, the Egyptian pyramids, and King Solomon’s Temple can all be linked to the group.
The tantalizingly inventive aspect of the author’s tale is the possibility of an “inner core” of “prophetic symbols received by the prophet Aram” thousands of years before the births of Jesus and Allah. But the ambitious expanse of history covered here has a price—Consta doesn’t create authentic characters. This isn’t really a novel in the usual sense of the term but an intricate history—it reads much more like an attempt to compose scripture than a literary production. This gives the entire work a ponderous feel, and the prose only reinforces that effect. The author’s writing is often densely packed and bewilderingly vague. The passages meant to elucidate the nature of the prophetic teachings are the most turgid: “Supreme Master, created from the same blood of Aram and the eternal perseverance and persistence of the crossed axis of the celestial globe and the sacred, unified will and wisdom of God, which humbly point us to the sacred points of the lights designated from our creators, ascend to the top of this temple and point us with the sacred sword to the right Blazing Star.” While Consta’s work is reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it fails to fully develop the intriguing novelistic elements of the story.
An innovative but uneven spiritual tale.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-656829-5
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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