A knotty, philosophical mystery dense with lingering regrets.
In Harnett’s debut novel, a middle-aged man reflects on his adolescence while searching for his missing first love and the contentedness that has eluded him.
In the year 2033, the 52-year-old narrator’s old flame, June, contacts him and asks him to look after her cat. She then disappears—precisely as climate protests in the United States give way to a dissolution of government. As the nation is reborn in small pockets of local administration, the narrator returns to his hometown, Harmony Valley, in search not only of June, but of the simplicity of childhood. The unnamed narrator was 12 years old and June 15 when they first met at school. She pulled him into a half-real fantasy, shadowing the school janitor and uncovering the meeting room of a secret society—the L.E.F (“The Order of Friends of Liberty”). While the narrator lost interest and drifted into an unsatisfying life, June took the L.E.F. seriously. Around that time, Vietnamese lawyer Tiffany Ho joined the law firm of Jeremiah & Jeremiah, a generational enterprise that has long acted for one important client. How are June, Tiffany, and the L.E.F. connected? Sifting through his memories, can the narrator finally make sense of the past and seize hold of the happiness he let slip through his fingers? Harnett writes in the first person, crafting a wistful work that reflects both the uncertain child and the nostalgic adult. The prose grows wild and heavy with description, the narrator feeling his way and making no attempt to cut extraneous recollections or orientate the reader regarding the political upheaval. The tale is thus heavily immersive—and all the better for it (though readers who prefer clarity will appreciate the appended timeline of events). As is so often the way with memoir, the young narrator emerges more clearly than his older self. June is a force of nature, as enigmatic in later life as she was in school. Other characters come and go via well-drawn vignettes. The story must slowly be pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle, and the sorting is perhaps more satisfying than the final picture. Nonetheless, there is plenty here to reward the reader’s commitment. Numerous full-page black-and-white illustrations accompany the text and recall the excitability of middle-grade stories.
A knotty, philosophical mystery dense with lingering regrets.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9867445-4-4
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Serpent Key Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
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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