A powerful exploration of artistic ambition, deception, and redemption.
Aspiring journalist Violet Maris embarks on an audacious scheme that threatens to unravel her identity in Wald’s novel.
Violet Maris, a 26-year-old journalist, sees an opportunity for a groundbreaking exposé when she learns about The Home, a prestigious artists’ residency in Provincetown that may not be all that it seems. Since journalists aren’t admitted, she goes undercover and submits her mentor Spencer Bayrose’s unpublished stories as her own. With his approval, she secures a prestigious fellowship and enters the insular world of The Home. There, she encounters a diverse group of artists, forming tentative bonds with fellow “verbals” (writers) and “visuals” (painters and sculptors), including the sensitive poet Cordelia, the blunt fiction writer Phrank, and the captivating Jeanette. Despite her initial skepticism, she becomes immersed in the creative energy of The Home, a place where ambition clashes with creativity. But her deception weighs heavily on her, especially as she grows close to Gene Pelletier, a board member she lied to about her intentions to report on the retreat. Her secret is further complicated by Spencer’s declining health. After his death from AIDS, Violet is left to confront her grief while carrying the weight of her deception. The novel’s introspective first-person narration allows readers to fully immerse themselves in Violet’s perspective. Provincetown’s setting comes to life with its seaside, bohemian vibes and vibrant energy (“The weather, while not as frigid as it was on the mainland, had a soul-chilling quality that made you feel a bit bipolar—alternately anxious and elated. My own moods, in fact, did vacillate between the two”). Sharp dialogue, like Gene Pelletier’s guarded remark about The Home’s privacy, adds depth to the story (“Miss Maris…I doubt any of them would want to participate in anything like that. It’s kind of a private space for us, you know. Everybody’s there to work on their art”). As Violet balances her growing attachment to The Home with the guilt of her deceit, the novel builds toward an inevitable reckoning. The lies that once felt so clever now feel suffocating, and the price of her ambition may be more than she anticipated.
A powerful exploration of artistic ambition, deception, and redemption.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781646035953
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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