A charming, steamy, and intersectional, if a bit uneven, Victorian yarn.
A new plot of espionage and corruption plagues the Roxburys in Sterling’s sequel.
Anne Roxbury, the biracial American widow of the Duke of Westmoure, has settled into her life in the English aristocracy. Her son, named Sterling but called “Sar,” is the family’s heir, entrusted with the lucrative Westmoure Shipping Company, and she has close connections to the King of England, who is also biracial. She’s even found love again with the Duke of Hampton, Thomas Berkley, the King’s cousin. But other vying members of the upper class, including Viscountess Sylvia Meacham and a woman known as “Boss,” have eyes on the company. Unbeknownst to the Roxburys, a plot has emerged to traffic opium and women across Europe and the Middle East, frame the Westmoures, and steal the organization. Multiple attempts are made on Anne and her family’s lives, including a poisoning, and the bodies begin piling up. The local paper’s gossip section, much like Lady Whistledown’s newsletter in the Bridgerton novels, launches a racist smear campaign against the family, blaming their “less than pure blood” for the recent deaths and corruption in the company. In Sterling’s sequel to The American Duke: A Regency-Era Novel (2023), detailed sex scenes punctuate dramatic moments, though they’re made more arresting by Anne’s and Thomas’ middle age and mutual affection. But unlike in the Bridgerton books and others like it, Sterling makes a point to include the reality of racism’s burden on Anne and her family in 19th-century England. Referring to the treatment of Black people, Anne tells Thomas, “They’re accused of stealing, doing things they’ve never done, and then tried and convicted on the spot. Punishment could be anything from chopping off a hand to lynching, just to enforce that the white man is superior to the Negro. This is what we live with, this is what we must do to survive.” The plot and pacing lag in the middle, particularly with so many supporting characters milling about. But revelations toward the end about secret marriages and family connections, as well as the identity of one of the takeover plotters, set this series up well for a third installment and the new challenges Anne will have to face within her family and her social class.
A charming, steamy, and intersectional, if a bit uneven, Victorian yarn.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798986393322
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Krystal Kat Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
