One man’s personal and spiritual adventure makes for a profound and intriguing tale.
In this debut novel set in the late 1980s, a young Indian American, descended from a Buddhist saint, falls in love on his path to bringing enlightenment to the world.
John Yogacara Asanga, born to an Indian father and American mother, endures his fair share of racism in Kokomo, Indiana. After his dad dies and his mom remarries, the teenager leaves home to explore the world, starting with Chicago. He finally finds acceptance with the El Quawai gang, which runs drugs and forces girls to become sex workers. But before long, he embarks on the next part of his journey in India. Immediately smitten with Aanya Devi Ghosa, a local Indian Buddhist and widow, at an ashram, he tries to surpass her other suitors. But John has a destiny, the one his father once sought to fulfill; he wishes “to reveal to Westerners truths that emanate from the East.” A council of kings allows him to become an emissary but first tasks him with retrieving the Antahkarana, an Indian relic stolen long ago. Aanya joins John on his quest to the Kaziranga jungle, a spiritual mission that involves facing a demigod and restoring the bridge between humankind and God. Davis’ captivating novel opens with a lengthy coming-of-age tale. John falls in love twice, indulges in cocaine in Chicago, and winds up entangled in an FBI investigation. Amazingly, the story hardly slows down when he reaches India, as he competes with a prince to win Aanya’s affections and soon begins his quest. The author exalts Eastern religions, presenting such notions and sights as a “tiger-sorceress” as genuine, never otherworldly. At the same time, he deftly grounds the protagonist. Wherever he goes, John is an outcast—too dark-skinned for bigoted American schoolmates but not a “pure” Indian in Ladakh. This book unfortunately falters with a few mistakes; for example, John’s father’s death prompted the teen’s Kokomo departure in June 1988. But readers later learn that his father died in October of that year.
One man’s personal and spiritual adventure makes for a profound and intriguing tale.Pub Date: May 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-9-39-026020-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
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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