A satisfying if overlong act of literary reanimation, appropriate to its setting.
Claire Clairmont—free-thinker, “foraging wild woman,” lover of Lord Byron and stepsister of Mary Shelley—was present at but erased from the history of a mythic moment in English literature.
Franklin follows her novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner with another bio-fiction, this time based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s less famous stepsister. Narrated from 1879, the story hinges on Claire’s journal of the year 1816, when she was 17, living with Mary and her partner, poet Percy Shelley, in London, helping Mary with her infant son. The couple are unwed, Shelley being already married—such is the era’s modernism, to which Claire herself subscribes, boldly writing to the famous, wealthy, wildly successful poet Byron. She falls under his languid spell and becomes his lover, their consummation delayed by intense foreplay. Claire then engineers a summer meeting between Byron and the Shelleys at Lake Geneva, with the two households as neighbors, Byron in the grander dwelling, Villa Diodati. Franklin’s lengthy, detailed tale expends the bulk of its pages in this famous setting, where the men discuss writing and ideas while the women speculate on masculinity. Claire’s first-person narration delivers an immersion into her introverted, lonely, sensitive, unconventional persona among this creative group: Mary, with whom the relationship is close but combative; Shelley, who has a sexual interest in her; John Polidori, a physician with his own sexual preferences; and Byron, mercurial, both available (sometimes) and distant. The author’s lyrical prose doesn’t wholly distract from a sense of stasis as the days pass, the weather, food, moods, and correspondence are explored, until eventually the moment comes when the group decides to write ghost stories, including what will be Mary’s classic Frankenstein, and Claire declares a turning point of her own. Above all, the novel is a devoted restoration of a figure whose presence and contribution were obscured by men’s—and Mary’s—interventions.
A satisfying if overlong act of literary reanimation, appropriate to its setting.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781567928563
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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