An entertaining, imaginative post-apocalyptic scenario with special appeal for animal lovers.
A rebel rabbit turns the world of predators and prey on its head in this debut fantasy.
Some centuries in the future, humans—now called the Dead Gods—and many animals are extinct. According to History of the Known World by Thimble Thimbalian, “Only six kinds of creatures were left in the Million Acre Wood for the canids to hunt: Deer, raccoon, rabbit, squirrel, rat, mouse.” Rabbits believe Yah has decreed they must be Glorified by a Blessed One, or, in other words, become a predator’s meal, accepting their fate in a surrender called the Giving. It’s a dictum unquestioned by all but Anastasia, a brown yearling rabbit living in Bloody Thorn Warren. When she’s injured escaping from a Blessed One, she returns to the warren, endangering it; maybe worse, she publicly questions the mercy of Yah. Since the barren Anastasia is already something of a problem doe, this is the last straw for Olympia, the Warren Mother, who orders exile. Now, without a warren, Anastasia is enormously vulnerable, but she accidentally stabs an attacking fox with a sharpened stick, driving it off. What if next time, she could do it on purpose? As she works out strategies, stragglers from other warrens join Anastasia, who trains them and makes alliances with other prey. In exchange for nut storage, squirrels serve as sentries, and mice lend their tiny hands to making weaponry from supplies bought from Bricabrac, a water rat tinker. Meanwhile, disbelieving predators encounter fierce resistance when they target the Warren Sans Gloire, as Anastasia’s settlement is dubbed. Wolves are the landlords of the Million Acre Wood and coyotes have always collected the rent for them successfully, but now the predators are getting very hungry. This means war—and the rabbits are ready.
In his series opener, St. John presents a world similar in some ways to Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972), where rabbits (and other animals) have language, culture, myths, and games. That said, the post-apocalyptic, apparently North American setting is far different; the points of view and abilities are more varied (a few animals are somehow able to read, piecing together what they can from texts left by the Dead Gods); and dialogue reflects human culture. A flirtatious buck named Love Bug, for example, employs rabbit-inflected pickup lines (“Did you thump just now, or was that the earth moving under my feet?”); Bricabrac calls himself “a businessrat.” Naming conventions are varied and often amusing, especially the tiny mice with names like Throat Punch, Death Rage, and Moody Loner. The premise of prey learning to fight back is intriguing but puzzling. How can carnivorous animals like wolves and foxes survive without prey? Able to reproduce without check, wouldn’t creatures like rabbits soon eat everything in sight? Perhaps the balance-of-nature question will be answered in future installments; readers are likely to want to stay tuned.
An entertaining, imaginative post-apocalyptic scenario with special appeal for animal lovers. (Fantasy, 12+)Pub Date: June 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-688570-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Harvest Oak Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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