An outstanding cast electrifies this extraordinary melodrama.
In this novel, two teenagers enduring traumas bond over conversations at their shared wooden fence.
Emma Love, 17, is only in Minnesota to be close to her big sister. Noelle has been in the hospital in a vegetative state after her boyfriend savagely beat her. His well-known family plans to use its affluence to lighten his sentence while Emma can only hope, despite the medical opinions, that Noelle wakes up. Fortunately, Emma finds someone she can confide in—Eve Anderson, her 17-year-old peer on the other side of the huge fence separating their properties. Emma observes that “the fence could have been designed by a film crew for a prison movie. It’s wooden, at least eight feet high, the slats so tight there’s no way to see through to the other side. The top, instead of being flat, is a splinter nightmare.” Although Eve seems troubled, she sidesteps any conversations about herself. Readers know that she lives with “Papa,” the fiend who kidnapped her when she was a little girl. He regularly abuses Eve and is the father of her 4-year-old daughter, Honey. Papa effectively imprisons Eve, who would like nothing more than to escape his clutches with Honey in tow. That doesn’t seem feasible, but perhaps there’s a chance that her new friend, whom she’s never actually seen, can help. Schrack masterfully develops two sublime lead characters. Emma and her sister, for example, are orphaned daughters of famous rock stars, and their beloved archaeologist aunt took them in as toddlers. Eve still remembers and misses her real family while Honey has no idea the teen is her mom. Succinct chapters oscillate between Emma and Eve as narrators, providing insights into each (for example, how Papa manages to isolate Eve and Honey from the rest of the world). Scenes inside Papa’s oppressive household are unsurprisingly grim, but Eve displays impressive and admirable strength that only occasionally falters. The author further bolsters her tale with evolving relationships, from Emma’s romantic interest to an individual potentially on Eve’s side. Plot turns in the latter half, even when they’re predictable, prove riveting, all the way until the gratifying ending.
An outstanding cast electrifies this extraordinary melodrama.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 979-8886531299
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Fire & Ice Young Adult Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2023
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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