Personal drama and historical tidbits combine nicely for a quick and entertaining read.
This second volume in Braun’s trilogy continues exploring the hidden histories of guests at a California bed-and-breakfast, now under new ownership.
Eighty-year-old interior designer Annie Parker has just completed her first year as the proprietor of a seven-cabin B&B that she bought on impulse while visiting Lake Arrowhead and recovering from a broken marriage. She’s been working on a long-term redecorating project for her most lucrative client, Grayson Underwood, an elegant, wealthy part-time resident. She also meets Carrie Davis, a stylish older woman who grew up in Lake Arrowhead and returned after a painful divorce to care for her elderly mother; she becomes not only a new customer for Annie, but a new friend, as well. Carrie’s mother left the lake house to her, and she’s ready to sort through decades of family keepsakes and begin redecorating—a project that unexpectedly reveals her mother’s secrets. Meanwhile, Annie and Noah Chambers, a local construction contractor, have become a couple, although neither has fully committed to the relationship, which results in jealousy and conflict. Noah believes that Grayson is interested in Annie romantically, and Annie worries that Noah’s new client, Bunny Bryant, has amorous intentions. Following the format established in the series opener, Annie and Carrie alternate narration in a story in which the cabins serve as an intersection point. Local history surrounding the Tudor House, a popular local venue for weddings, events, and musical productions, plays an important, surprising role in Carrie’s history and adds an intriguing element to the narrative; in the 1920s and '30s, it was owned by an infamous mobster and was a speak-easy retreat for Hollywood luminaries: “There were photos of Bugsy Siegel helping a woman out of a car, others of well-known actors coming up to the mountains, including Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante." Annie’s story, as in the first volume, contains an overabundance of decorating details, including schematic drawings of rooms she’s redesigning, but this time Braun places greater focus on the more engaging issue of Annie’s challenging relationships.
Personal drama and historical tidbits combine nicely for a quick and entertaining read.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9781647046323
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Marble Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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