A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.
Against a historical backdrop of UFO sightings, a dying man tries to nudge the world along a righteous path in Kaufman’s novel.
Rhome, Texas, 1897. August Simms has returned to Rhome ostensibly to investigate reports of mysterious airships landing there. But his purpose for returning to Rhome is twofold. August is also dying and wants to spend his final days at the Martin family boardinghouse where his wife, Christy, died some 15 years before, and he wants to be buried beside her. But life keeps happening in the interim to interfere with his plans. Nadine Martin now runs the boardinghouse and doesn’t remember August at first. But her father was murdered back then, just before Christy’s death, and the true killer (as everyone knew) was spirited off by the railroad bosses; Luther Williams, an innocent local Black man, was lynched instead. August and his old friend Judge Proctor are racked with guilt over not doing enough to stop Luther’s lynching. Racism, no surprise, is alive and well in Rhome in 1897. But then something else comes to light that’s even more incendiary than anything related to racially motivated hate crime. The righteous townspeople (spurred on by the railroad crew) are enraged and will do anything they can to save innocent people in harm’s way. There are more good people to be noted, like Bill Ackerman, August’s wagon driver and wingman, and huge Bose Williams, son of Luther, and Natalie Martin, Nadine’s daughter, who is suffering the throes of adolescence. Kaufman is a fantastic writer with a distinctive poetic touch (consider such lapidary phrases as “a smile threatening the corners of his mouth” or “morning arrives like a shovel to the head”). And August Simms is a charming, sympathetic protagonist; he’s a true font of wisdom and a still point in the storms that rage in Rhome. It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this soulful, poignant novel.
A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132620
Page Count: 284
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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