Engaging and tender, with vivid characters.
In Morriss’ Depression-era drama, an orphaned girl finds unexpected sanctuary on a horse ranch in Missouri.
In 1874, a rioting mob of “Red Shirts” perpetrated the massacre of more than a hundred freed Black men, women, and children in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Among the victims of this bloody violence are the Black de-facto wife and unborn child of Buckus Del Henny, son of an antebellum plantation owner. Bereaved and enraged, Buckus retrieves the family’s hidden treasure and heads north until he reaches the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, where he purchases a vast tract of land marked by a 50-foot-long hedge of thorny Osage orange trees. Planting seeds from the trees, he eventually creates 20 miles of a thickly intertwined natural barrier surrounding his private oasis. It is within this protected enclave, in 1931, that we meet the nervous main protagonist, 16-year-old Maizie Sunday Freedman, bereft of family and seeking employment at what is now the Glidewell Ranch. The property has been bought by James and Mary Glidewell and converted into a grand estate where the Glidewells, who are White, raise and train quarter horses. Maizie is taken under Mary’s wing, and the biracial teenager is given the opportunity and loving guidance to grow and develop her talents. But the ugliness of racism, with which the novel opens, is a continuing thread that pierces the entire narrative, even within the welcoming arms of the ranch. Morriss’ character-driven tale is a poignant period piece covering the next five years of Maizie’s life. Capp, likable son of the ranch’s stable manager, captures her young heart, but a series of soap opera–worthy obstacles keep the romance hovering on the cusp. There are other, more sexually adventurous women vying for Capp’s attention, and Mary is opposed to a romantic relationship between the two because interracial marriage is still illegal. Although there are few surprises in the story’s trajectory, Morriss generates solid tension in sections devoted to the thrills, disappointments, and dangers of horse racing, treating readers to a primer on the public and private details of the sport.
Engaging and tender, with vivid characters.Pub Date: May 10, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Bygone Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
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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