A vivid but slow-paced recounting of one woman’s self-reckoning, steeped in nostalgia.
A middle-aged woman abandons her husband and children to embark on a cross-country trip in search of a more satisfying life in this debut novel.
Carolyn Tanner used to be something special. Back in college in the 1960s, she was an activist, a hippie, a bit of a druggy, and a budding playwright with big dreams. Somewhere along the way, she veered onto another path. Now that the ’80s have rolled around, Caro finds herself a disillusioned suburban wife and mother in an upscale Connecticut town with little else on her résumé. When she dreams one night about an old flame from her more colorful college days, she worries she’s had a premonition—that this man needs her help. Suddenly desperate to escape her cookie-cutter life, she begins to plan her liberation. After she drops her three kids at the bus stop for summer camp, she leaves a vague note for her husband and takes off in search of her college sweetheart, Peter MacKinley. As Caro crosses the country on this multiday journey, the story alternates between scenes from her adult life and those she remembers more fondly from her younger years. But the further she delves into her memories of Peter, the more she realizes that the relationship she had with him was complicated, too. As the tale progresses, Caro is forced to come to grips with what she really wants and what she may be leaving behind. Told primarily through flashbacks, Caro reveals much about both her married life and her bohemian college days. Shepherd’s novel contains entertaining details of the ’60s and ’80s, deftly capturing the atmosphere of both time periods. Told in the first person from Caro’s perspective, the book reads very similarly to a memoir, meandering through the formative events in her life. But the story suffers from the inclusion of too many scenes that do little to advance the narrative, instead creating an often sluggish tempo. Even so, the tale explores many weighty topics relating to life’s transitions with insight and grace. From sexual orientation to personal ambition, grief, friendship, and self-esteem, the author dives deep. For those interested in journeys of self-discovery and the circuitous paths of personal relationships, the payoff is ultimately worth it.
A vivid but slow-paced recounting of one woman’s self-reckoning, steeped in nostalgia.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-026-0
Page Count: 353
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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