A rich portrait of a man and a town hanging by a thread, beautifully written and deeply felt.
A banker looking for second chances navigates the treacherous social currents of a small town in Montana in Petersen’s soulful novel.
Returning to his boyhood home of Harlowton, Montana, after alcoholism, womanizing, and an occasionally violent temper demolished his career and marriage in Bozeman, Chet Norem takes a job as president of the Harlo International National Bank and starts rebuilding his life. That’s not easy, given the numerous oddballs and schemers among the townsfolk. First among them is his boyhood pal Charlie Shinola, a loose-cannon cowboy whom Chet is always rescuing from scrapes, including a two-day bender that concluded with Charlie driving Chet’s truck into a deer (which left Charlie with a ticket from the game warden and a major repair bill). Further complicating Chet’s life are the bank’s majority stockholder, who constantly questions Chet’s decisions, and Chet’s lawyer, who secretly spreads malicious rumors about the deer crash to besmirch his client’s reputation. Chet’s also fighting a cold war with his cruel ex-wife, Jess (“You look...smaller than I remember,” she jibes), and trying to repair his relationship with his estranged son, Noel, a gay theater major and drug addict who believes that Chet is not his father—and is under the spell of a sinister artist. On the plus side is Lacey Dey-Lux, the multifaceted daughter of a wealthy rancher—she’s a southern belle, assertive businesswoman, and painter—who borrows money from the bank to build a riding arena; she and Chet begin a torrid affair, with Chet only somewhat perturbed by the fact that she’s married. Chet continues trying to shore up his family, friends, and business, but his moral compromises increasingly destabilize his situation and put his reputation as a steady financial pillar at risk, until tensions come to a head in a shocking eruption of bloodshed.
Petersen’s yarn feels like a sagebrush-flavored John Updike novel. It evokes the vast landscape of Montana cattle country, where even a banker must contend with winds and hailstorms, glittering but treacherous trout streams, and corrals knee-deep in manure. The labyrinthine narrative loops back and forth across generations of Harlo’s secret loves, vendettas, and hidden parentages, knotting the characters into intricate skeins of resentment and obligation. Chet is a tarnished but decent hero, a careful numbers guy with a yen for art and poetry stuck in mid-life, still grasping at sex and happiness but rueful and ruminative about his failings. (“He hadn’t hugged his daughter in several weeks, and he hadn’t spoken to his son in months. At some point, it dawns on a man that he just may never love again.”) Petersen’s prose luxuriates in pungent, pitch-perfect dialogue that banters obliquely around his characters’ conflicts—until it comes harshly to the point. (Confronted in flagrante by a jealous, knife-wielding boyfriend, Chet hears “the morning-after hacksaw voice of his lovebird waitress, the perfect tone and texture to convey her considerable wrath: ‘Lousy fucking chickenshit showing up here like this now…You stand back or I’ll blow you in half before you so much as nick a hair offa his ever-lovin’ ass.’”) The result is a superb modern Western, full of evocative detail and hard-bitten wisdom.
A rich portrait of a man and a town hanging by a thread, beautifully written and deeply felt.Pub Date: June 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781941052761
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Pronghorn Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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