A subtle book that brings to bear all its author’s prodigious skill. A must-read.
A mother and her two teenage daughters relocate to a remote cottage by the sea for a fresh start only to discover that what they’ve brought with them may be worse than what they left behind.
Sisters September and July are unusually close. Less than a year apart in age, the girls share a language of preferences, games, sometimes even thoughts that makes their mother, Sheela, feel excluded and that causes their teachers to categorize them as “isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty.” The children’s father, Peter, is dead, drowned in a hotel pool while on vacation, but the memory of his capricious cruelty haunts Sheela and taints her enjoyment of her oldest daughter, September, who strongly resembles him. Nevertheless, the family makes a life together in Oxford, where their mother writes and illustrates children’s books featuring the girls’ fictional adventures. Then, something dreadful happens, something so awful that July can’t remember what exactly it was, and they flee to Settle House, the cottage where their father was conceived and September was born, high on the North York Moors by the sea. Once there, the girls are left on their own while Sheela locks herself in her room, emerging only sometimes at night to cook meals, which she leaves for them to eat by themselves. Isolated by the lonely moors that surround them and by their mother’s near abandonment, which the girls take as anger over what happened in Oxford, September and July’s already claustrophobic relationship becomes something verging on a possession as July’s identity is slowly sublimated under the more dominant personality of her sister and the smothering nature of the house itself. When the instigating event that caused them to leave Oxford finally comes to light, it does so with an incandescence that reilluminates everything that has come before; what the reader and July herself should have seen all along, if only we had known how to look. Johnson—whose first novel, Everything Under (2018), made her the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—brings her nuanced sense of menace and intimate understanding of the perils of loving too much to this latest entry in her developing canon of dark places where the unspeakable speaks and speaks.
A subtle book that brings to bear all its author’s prodigious skill. A must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18895-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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