An inventive and enchanting fable about marriage, sisterhood, and embarrassing medical conditions.
Two sisters develop life-changing abilities in Carlton’s novelistic retelling of a classic fairy tale.
Gwendolyn Honeydale’s father is dead, but she seems to be the only one who cares. Her vain sister, Fanny, wears a dress to the funeral so revealing that it distracts the priest, and her stingy mother allows the gravediggers to take as payment the coin in her father’s mouth—the one that tradition says is for paying St. Peter. With her father gone, Gwen is completely at the mercy of the older Honeydale women, who force her to sleep in the attic and shoulder most of the housework. The only kindness she finds comes from Paolo, the handsome young glassmaker who’s just come to town to sell his wares in the marketplace. Gwen’s mother has arranged to have Fanny married off to Tobias Prigghemp, the detestable eldest son of a local landowner and favorite of the king. Even worse, her mother wants Gwen to marry Jerome Prigghemp, the younger brother, meaning she can’t act on the mutual attraction she feels with Paolo. When Gwen encounters an old woman in the woods, she offers her water, only to discover that the woman is a witch—or, if the woman is to be believed, Gwen’s fairy godmother. The woman grants Gwen an unasked-for ability of arguable value: Now, diamonds and roses tumble, unwanted, out of her mouth. While socially embarrassing, the idea of unlimited diamonds inspires the older Tobias to rescind his offer to Fanny and extend it to Gwen instead. Miffed, Fanny hunts down the fairy godmother and receives a similar—if less desirable—ability: When she cries, vipers and toads escape from her mouth. These traits make life quite a bit more complicated for the Honeydale sisters. Suspected of witchcraft, Fanny is forced to go on the run, and she soon becomes the apprentice of the fairy who cursed her. Meanwhile, Gwen is newly betrothed to a gorgeous prince and whisked off to the capital. Gwen is no happier with the new situation than Fanny, and both will have to figure out a way to free themselves from their bizarre circumstances.
Carlton writes with great humor and specificity, forging, like Paolo with his glasswork, a unique sensibility within a world of familiar fairy-tale trappings. Here, Fanny sneaks into Gwen’s wedding to the prince and invisibly watches her sister from above: “Fanny was still agitated with envy but it was obvious that Gwendolyn was unhappy…She hadn’t smiled once during the ceremony and looked as scared as a half-drowned kitten. She’s just a commodity to the royals, thought Fanny. More of a mineral mine than a queen consort.” The first act of the novel is a fleshed-out but more or less faithful treatment of the Charles Perrault story “The Faeries.” Carlton’s contribution is to continue playing out the scenario, allowing characters who initially seem one-dimensional to deepen and change in unexpected ways. Readers unfamiliar with the original story will still enjoy this witty, immersive fantasy.
An inventive and enchanting fable about marriage, sisterhood, and embarrassing medical conditions.Pub Date: April 15, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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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