A well-crafted tale that offers readers hope in changing times.
A novel about a broken-down former college football player in need of redemption and a town seeking salvation.
Down-and-out Nick Remke arrives in Longview, Ohio, by train in 1997 and gets directions to Made Right, the town’s largest employer. The clothing factory is barely hanging on, buffeted by foreign competition. During his job interview, Nick meets administrative assistant Marie Zanay, who suggests that he play up his football experience. He tells the co-owners that he played briefly for Notre Dame and that his real last name is Nocero; he’d changed it to his mother’s maiden name, he says, after his dad left the family. The thrilled, football-crazy owners give him a plant-manager position that had been offered to someone else. Soon, Marie, whose son Brian is the star of the high school football team, and Nick grow closer. After the football coach suffers a stroke, Nick gets pressured into taking the job by his bosses, and the team starts winning. At the same time, Made Right’s fortunes rebound, and both the team and the rest of the townsfolk begin to believe that this stranger could save them all. Then an ambitious local sportswriter discovers unexpected information that changes everything. Katz, the author of The Whistleblower (2020), has created a setting in Longview that many readers will recognize: a struggling town that’s unable to adapt to a global economy. Nick, who’s in dire straits himself, does what he has to do to get one more chance to prove himself, and he finds the perfect spot in Longview, which is full of people still wanting to believe in something. The author shows how Nick and the town’s residents help each other to grow and change, and his choice of an anonymous resident as a narrator, looking back at Nick’s actions, is effective, as he moves from being a skeptic to a believer before finally reaching a kind of middle ground. Also, Katz, a former sportswriter, manages to bring the quaint atmosphere of small-town football to life. Overall, it’s an endearing portrait of an abandoned part of America.
A well-crafted tale that offers readers hope in changing times.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-97-779152-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Trolley Car Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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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