An engaging tale that provides a fresh look at the importance of second chances.
Following her father’s mysterious death, a young woman returns to her childhood home, unexpectedly reuniting with her first great love and uncovering lingering family secrets.
As Lucy Cooper delivers the eulogy at her father’s funeral on Winthrop Island, a Northeast vacation spot where her dad lived year-round, she can’t believe he’s gone. It’s been years since she’s seen him, both because of her relocation to Europe and her dad’s embarrassing obsession with chasing pirate treasure. Lucy is surprised to discover that her long-ago crush, Ben Ressler, has returned to the island to nurse his own wounds. A disgraced NFL player, Ben recently made a tackle that caused another player’s death; the fallout ended both his career and his marriage. While Lucy and Ben try to grieve their losses, they find themselves drawn to each other again. Meanwhile someone is targeting Lucy, breaking into her father’s house and intentionally unsettling her for reasons she can’t glean. As she searches for answers, the narrative shifts to two other timelines: First, flashbacks to Lucy and Ben’s high school courtship in 2012; and 1717, when a young woman named Hephzibah met the pirate Ramsay. As the stories progress in tandem, it becomes clear that Lucy’s father’s treasure hunt may not have been so crazy after all, and that Lucy and Ben might still find happiness together. The chapters alternate among characters, portraying Lucy in first person, with Ben and Hephzibah’s chapters in a more distant third. The portions focused on Lucy and Ben are instantly engaging, while Hephzibah’s story gets off to a much slower start, the temporal and tonal shifts feeling abrupt and out of sync with the tenor of the more modern tale. Readers may be tempted to skim in order to get back to Lucy or Ben, but the plotlines gradually interconnect, rendering the 1717 tale more absorbing as it progresses. A particular strength of the book is the setting of Winthrop Island, atmospheric in its isolation, with uncontrolled natural elements and community elements enriching the story. Similarly, as Lucy and Hephzibah each battle villains, the author eventually brings the suspense to a breathtaking crescendo that makes the entire book worthwhile.
An engaging tale that provides a fresh look at the importance of second chances.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9798217094820
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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