A historically engaging and intermittently challenging read, with fine courtroom drama and a few surprises.
In Earth’s historical novel, a young English barrister finds himself at the center of religious, social, political, and legal turmoil in mid-19th-century England.
Judge Edmund Hornby, charged with establishing and managing Britain’s Consular Court in Constantinople, needs a junior clerk. The government powers that be have selected James Bingham, an unseasoned junior barrister who has toiled to overcome the deprivations of his background, to fill the post. It’s the first time that James has even heard of the Consular Court. His mission is to help Hornby create a unified code by which the diverse factions in the “uncivilised” Ottoman Empire could work together with the British Empire on legal issues: “I need such a code. One that does more than copy French law. A code that applies the most fundamental principles of justice with Ottoman conditions in mind,” the Turkish foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, tells Hornby. “So, let’s create it together.” Kazim Hasan, the teacher of a Turkish legal study group, selects Osman Mehmed, an angry young man who resents the British, to work with Hornby’s team. James discovers, upon his arrival in Constantinople, that the establishment of codes is constantly delayed by trials that require immediate attention—one of which involves the sexual assault of a young child. Earth soon adds the tempestuous Rosamund Colborne, the scandal-prone daughter of a successful merchant, to the diverse cast; she provides romantic and legal drama to a story overflowing with culture clashes. Working from historical records, the author imaginatively builds upon actual cases handled by Hornby, fictionalizing them to suit his three main characters, each struggling to find their identities in a changing world. Overall, Earth’s legally complex, occasionally wordy novel highlights the appalling plight of women of the era, as reflected in Shariah or British cultural convention. The skillfully composed narrative ambles slowly through its setting, painting a powerful portrait of a time and place, but then it picks up speed as it rockets to an explosive conclusion.
A historically engaging and intermittently challenging read, with fine courtroom drama and a few surprises.Pub Date: March 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798215602690
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Eorthe Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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