Gritty, macabre, and historically rich.
In Brooke’s gothic historical novel, set in 17th-century Scotland, two sisters who work as healers are accused of witchcraft.
Elspeth Blackwood and her older sister, Isla, were raised in a family of trusted healers. They live together in a cottage outside Fife with Elspeth’s 4-year-old daughter, Annabel, who’s called Anna. Anna’s father was a sailor who headed out to sea shortly after learning Elspeth was pregnant, never to be heard from again. The two sisters are enjoying a quiet respite by the shore when they realize Anna has disappeared. Terrified, Elspeth finds the child beneath a cliff from which she’s fallen. They bring the chilled and frightened girl home, and Elspeth tends to her, missing her appointment to check on her patient Mr. Thomas, who’s dying from pneumonia. The following day, Elspeth arrives just in time to sit with Thomas as he takes his last breaths. In her raging grief, Thomas’ widow accuses Elspeth of being a witch. Worse is to come: When the sisters race to the house of another patient, Greer, who’s about to give birth, Isla sees immediately that the baby needs to be delivered by Cesarean section—but when the doctor arrives, he rejects Isla’s conclusion. Both mother and baby die, and the doctor spreads the lie that Isla caused the deaths. Readers know the shattering ending of Brooke’s disturbing narrative from the first page; the body of the novel tells the tale leading to that final horror. The author warns readers that this is not a story for the faint of heart, and she is correct. The narrative—overflowing with blood, gore, and misogyny—vividly depicts the viciousness with which the women accused of witchcraft are treated. The only emotional relief for readers is witnessing how the sisters pursue their vengeance against the townsfolk. Brooke’s passionate prose, lifted by the hint of a Scottish lilt, fills the pages with compelling details about the plants Elspeth and Isla use for their remedies (“the plot had blossomed into a healthy crop, ready to be crushed and powdered into medicinal salves, creams, and inhalants”)—and those they later use for vengeance.
Gritty, macabre, and historically rich.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2026
ISBN: 9798993477701
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2026
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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