A spellbinding, compelling, and multifaceted tale about an Iranian family haunted by war.
An Iranian woman living in America confronts the trauma of her war-torn childhood in this debut novel.
Honarvar’s tale opens in Shiraz, Iran, in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War. Kimia Shams is a 9-year-old girl on an errand to buy naan at a bakery when she is distracted by a puppet show performed by an enigmatic, aging storyteller. The square is targeted by a missile strike, and Kimia is dragged to safety by her brother, Arman. Kimia and her friend Reza Khan return to the scene of the devastation and discover a trapdoor that leads them into the magical realm of the storyteller, Baba Morshed. As the story unfolds, Baba tells the children a quest tale about the Simorgh, a bird from Persian mythology. Fast-forward to 2009, and Kimia is working as a spiritual counselor in California. She and her family still grapple with the psychological impact of war—her mother in particular is afflicted by bouts of shaking yet longs to return to her homeland. Kimia and her family journey to Iran but find themselves in the midst of the Green Uprising, where the ghosts of their past pose a clear danger. Honarvar’s gorgeously evocative prose subtly captures the young Kimia’s irrepressible delight in the face of oppression: “My sun-soaked eyes followed the touch, and although I couldn’t make out his face, I knew it was Reza. I broke into a smile. Not even my hijab could restrain the elation beaming from me.” The narrative is written predominantly from Kimia’s perspective, but some chapters are devoted to the viewpoints of other characters, such as Arman. Each is written in the first person, and although the author presents a variety of distinct voices, some readers may feel that a third-person narrative mode for such players would add further stylistic texture. This is a minor criticism of a story that draws beautifully on the power of Iranian fables to unearth the magical, restorative world that Kimia finds beneath the rubble of war: “The smooth texture of the wall changed to a rugged surface with dramatic peaks and valleys. I paused and examined a stone carving of the giant Simorgh stretched out before me.” This stellar first novel marks the writer as an author to watch.
A spellbinding, compelling, and multifaceted tale about an Iranian family haunted by war.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942436-46-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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