A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.
Driven to somehow expunge the stain of her racist upbringing, a young woman from a white supremacist family dedicates her entire life to becoming the ultimate double agent.
It’s not surprising that the Nazi-loving male figures in Rubin’s “near historical fiction novel” (set in the years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing) are terrible husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Sarah Cartell, the earnest protagonist in the eye of this storm of would-be stormtroopers, already understands this by the time she’s 8 years old and is sentenced along with her siblings to do penance on the rocky shores of “kneeling beach.” The kids’ crime? “Mixing” with a boy new to Goderich, Ontario, named Curtis Otonga, the son of a Nigerian doctor now working as a janitor at the local grade school. Sarah’s trespasses continue when, at 14, she and Curtis secretly become an item and she lands a job assisting the neighborhood librarian, Mrs. Broder. The librarian takes young Sara under her wing and reveals the awful truth about the girl’s Holocaust-denying “Grandpa” Thomas Cartell. Determined to not only escape the Cartell clan but also to thwart it, Sarah heads off to McGill University in Montreal on a mission to bring the white supremacists down before they and their clandestine network of skinheads and Nazi sympathizers can cause more harm. She does her best to break through the walls she’s erected around herself and manages to form close friendships with the very kind of people the Cartells abhor. But the increasing stress of being both a progressive university student and an undercover faux Nazi ultimately becomes too much for Sarah to manage, and she finds herself committed to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre under the care of Mona Rubinoff, who helps Sarah deal with the painful familial complexities inherent in being one of the Cartell clan’s unhappy progeny.
Rubin excels at keeping the humanity tied up in Sarah’s thorny situation front and center. Although committed to confronting the Cartell’s ignorant brand of evil head on, Sarah cannot simply eliminate the familial bonds that she shares with them—no matter how much she loathes their tainted worldview. Sarah can’t even reconcile the animal attraction she feels for her boyfriend Marc and her absolute revulsion regarding every sickening racist thing he advocates. The increasing angst and turmoil roiling inside Sarah’s slight 104-pound frame is rendered with startling realness, only increasing as the young woman further pursues her life’s mission. The author achieves this level of authenticity through the use of lean prose and stark dialogue, which often crackles with the energy of exchanges in a John Cassavetes movie. Readers are practically airdropped into Goderich, Ontario, to meet young Sarah Cartell in summer of 1982 and continue on with her all the way to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre in the mid-1990s; the “in the moment” feeling Rubin achieves is even more impressive when considering that the dark back story of the Cartell men (and two women who managed to escape their hateful existence) runs concurrently throughout Sarah’s intense journey.
A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781998206308
Page Count: 200
Publisher: re:books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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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