Travel, both conventional and through time, brings rousing action, romance, and unorthodox marriage counseling.
A bicycling trip around the world remains a beleaguered couple’s last chance to save their marriage from boredom, deceit, and time-traveling lovers from the past.
In this novel, Edward and Kara Vaughan are a Seattle couple nearing age 30 and married for almost six years. Their existence has already devolved into a monotonous routine, complete with a room of “forgotten hobbies” and a dwindling sex life. About to hand her husband divorce papers, Kara is shocked when he proposes they take the journey she’s long dreamed about—cycling around the world. She sees this as a chance to rekindle their relationship, but the impetus for Edward, a workaholic businessman, is merely the unceremonious way he quit his job after being passed up for a promotion. The last-minute trip begins with them struggling against the Montana winter, but what they later encounter on their odyssey poses a more unusual challenge. Accompanied by a strange blue shimmer are lovelorn anachronisms thrust into the present day, time travelers connected to Kara’s and Edward’s past lives. Some seem content that Kara has moved beyond them. But a religious pickpocket and forger from the Renaissance era named Alessio is not ready to let her go, leading to a showdown in Florence with Edward for Kara’s love or, barring that, her life. Walsh, a veteran of video game strategy guides, imbues his romance with as much action as any game he’s ever peeled back the secrets of. With the settings ranging from Washington state and Canada to London, Belgium, Paris, and, eventually, Italy, the novel captures the intense details of the trip, including the couple’s chafing thighs and exhaustion on their bikes; their emotionally heightened fights and sniping; and their moments of romantic rejuvenation in new, exotic surroundings. Despite his unwillingness to acquiesce like his fellow reincarnated brethren, Alessio is a sympathetic villain, driven by the same unrelenting pride and fear as Edward, a fitting physical obstacle for the couple to overcome if they wish to break the pattern of heartbreak. The book boasts an impressive knowledge of cycling as well as the history it draws from, be it Renaissance Italy or the time of the French Canadian voyageurs, a pleasant balance to its more outlandish conflicts.
Travel, both conventional and through time, brings rousing action, romance, and unorthodox marriage counseling.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73274-670-1
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Snoke Valley Books
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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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