A contemplative, complex weaving of intersecting generational stories capped by an emotionally satisfying ending.
A retired literature professor experiences real-life drama when aiding his granddaughter’s investigation of a Scottish immigrant who inherited a fortune—and mysteriously disappeared—in Dzahn’s novel.
Widower Francis Wallace, 79, is intrigued when his granddaughter, Adelaide Cohn, reveals that she has agreed to date Carson Smith, a law school classmate who has asked her out. Adelaide lives with Francis in his Manhattan apartment while attending law school in the mid-1990s. Although helpful around the household—she does the cooking—Adelaide is also a bit quiet and closed off. Francis learns from Adelaide’s mother, Olivia, that Adelaide’s college boyfriend died in a tragic incident. Carson becomes a regular dinner guest. Francis disparagingly draws a connection between the unctuous Carson and the grasping Morris Townsend character in Henry James’ novel Washington Square and judges him unworthy of Adelaide. She lets Carson leave for a job in San Francisco without assurances of any feelings greater than friendship. Adelaide immerses herself in part-time casework that includes discovering what happened to Mary MacDonalde, who immigrated to the United States from Scotland in 1904, then disappeared in 1913; any proven descendants of MacDonalde stand to inherit a multimillion-dollar fortune. Francis and Adelaide visit the upstate New York area where Mary worked as a governess, which leads to answers about her fate as well as shocking danger that leads to dramatic new life decisions for Francis and Adelaide.
The author has written an engrossing, richly detailed novel that delves into the minds of characters in a way that Francis, a Henry James scholar, might very well term Jamesian. Jane Austen fans will also enjoy this book’s links to her works, with Francis referencing Pride and Prejudice while discussing with Adelaide “the perils of a Jane Bennet–like manner and the importance of displaying one’s affections forthrightly.” Particularly satisfying are Francis’ Emma-like epiphanies about misjudging people, most notably Carson, as when the former professor takes himself to task: “Why had I not recognized that the young man’s high-society pretensions arose not from snobbery or opportunistic cunning but from the fictions we each construct to soothe our souls?” The book is packed with subplots, including Adelaide’s meetings with people claiming to be MacDonalde’s descendants, Adelaide and Francis’ minding a neighbor’s grandson who has cerebral palsy, and a surprising and somewhat out-of-left-field encounter with a serial killer. Yet these are largely effective grace notes within this well-orchestrated novel. Adelaide’s musings about Mary provide a glimpse into the introverted law student’s interior life; ultimately, however, the novel’s many byroads intersect to bring readers to Francis’ realization that he must engage more fully with other people in his life rather than hide in his world of literary analysis. Dzahn captures this evolution beautifully, with the professor noting, “And if the world of fiction was not as bright a star as before, perhaps the cause of that dimming was not loss but an increased luminescence all around.”
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2021
ISBN: 9781737083429
Page Count: 497
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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