A patiently detailed and heartfelt book about a challenged family and forgiveness.
In Wueste’s novel, a man’s family struggles to accept him when he’s released after nearly 20 years in prison.
Matt Keegan, an upper-middle-class white kid, does a very stupid thing in high school: He becomes a drug dealer, and a very naïve fellow student overdoses on his product. Matt doesn’t help himself by playing it ultra cool and remorseless at his trial. After 20 years in a Maryland prison, he’s released on parole; his younger sister, Jenny Arvizu, is determined that he make it in the outside world, so she takes him in to the home she shares with her husband, Hector, and their daughter, Julia. Hector runs a cafe that already employs ex-cons, so Matt has a job waiting for him. Jenny is well meaning but can be too much of a mother hen, and her parents are deeply angry, even after all the years of their son’s incarceration. Matt’s dad, Ted, is not only sure that Matt is going to mess up again, but also hopes he will, wanting Matt back out of their lives; Matt’s mother, Helene, is even more rigidly furious. She tells Jenny that she “‘won’t be coming to visit as long as he,’ the reference to her oldest child always spit from her mouth like venom, ‘is staying there.’” Complicating things even further is Kenneth Hoskins, the father of the girl who died. He stalks Matt, determined to provoke the kind of confrontation that will send him back to prison. The stakes are clear in Wueste’s compelling narrative: The Keegans have lived in a world of pain but have to learn forgiveness; Matt has to really understand how many people he has hurt and just how badly he has hurt them. Readers learn in the acknowledgments how much research went into this book about a very important topic, which, by its nature, offers deep human lessons. Readers may be reminded of Anne Tyler’s work, and not just because this story is set in Maryland; Wueste, who’s won justified praise for her previous novels, is that good.
A patiently detailed and heartfelt book about a challenged family and forgiveness.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781967077113
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Fox Island Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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