An implausible plot and main character keep this historical novel from taking off.
A young midwife is called upon to save a pope—and a city—in this work of historical fiction.
At age 17, Eleanore Blanchet is following in her late mother’s footsteps, working as a midwife and herbalist. She lives with her twin sister, Margot, who is about to marry a rich man, and their father, who works as a papal notary at Pope Clement VI’s extravagant palace in their city of Avignon. The year is 1347, and the city buzzes with rumors about a plague sweeping through Europe, as well as the news that the imperious Queen Joanna of Naples may soon be a resident of the city. Elea, as she’s called, is an anomaly for a girl of her time, literate in two languages. She takes her work seriously and has misgivings about her sister’s marriage that sound more modern than medieval. In historical novels, characters may have anachronistic attitudes and experiences, and that can work with the right grounding. This novel, though, overdoes it. Early in the story, Elea goes to the woods to gather plants and runs into a well-dressed man who introduces himself as Guigo. He begs her to sell him the hawthorn berries she’s just gathered so he can treat an important patient. When she describes the tincture she will make with them for her father, Guigo sweeps her off to his laboratory—and she realizes he is the physician to Clement. He declares her brilliant before he even knows whether the tincture will work and then, in a blink, she's in the pope’s inner chamber giving him a hands-on examination. A powerful 14th-century pope dropping trou in front of an unknown teenage girl more than strains credibility, and the plot takes more improbable twists as it progresses. There are some interesting minor characters and somber parallels between the effects of the plague and the violent social fractures it provokes in the 14th century and today, but the unlikely plot weakens the book.
An implausible plot and main character keep this historical novel from taking off.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780593475034
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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