A compelling tale of a man living a second life as his past threatens to catch up to him.
In the chaos of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one man seizes an opportunity at a new life in Sawyer’s novel.
Jack Albertson seemingly leads a fairly enviable life as a successful financier, but after running late to a meeting in the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he impulsively grabs an unexpected opportunity—in the form of identification from someone buried in the rubble. In the ensuing chaos and confusion after the attacks, Albertson begins the process of crafting a new identity while his friends and family mourn his old persona’s apparent death. From there, Sawyer takes readers on a 16-year journey as Albertson, now going by “Hal Jacobs,” becomes an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Then, in 2017, Albertson’s daughter from a previous relationship, Hayley, who’s now an adult-film actress in Los Angeles, spies “Hal” in a supermarket. She realizes that she’s found her biological father, whom she’d seen only sparingly in her youth. And when it turns out that the real Hal Jacobs did not, in fact, die in that rubble on 9/11, a lengthy game of cat and mouse ensues as Albertson tries to stay one step ahead of the life he’s left behind. The novel’s secondary characters are somewhat underdeveloped, as they’re mostly defined by their actions and responses to Albertson, who looms large over the novel. However, Sawyer provides impressively painstaking details about identity theft, from the mechanics of forgery to the bizarre legal status of being declared dead; readers watch the real Hal struggle to explain to the federal government that he’s not a screenwriter in California but a victim of a crime. Befitting a novel about a man who’s a virtual chameleon, Sawyer peppers the closing chapters with unexpected twists, leaving readers admiring Albertson’s tenacity and the thoroughness of his deceit but also sympathizing with the family he left in the dust.
A compelling tale of a man living a second life as his past threatens to catch up to him.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-883752-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Information Plus
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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