An often compelling historical overview but an uneven drama.
Reynolds offers a novel set during the final decade of the battle for women’s suffrage in the United States.
One morning in May 1912, in the small town of Sycamore Falls, Kansas, Kathryn Wolfe is opening the Main Street Bookshop, which she co-owns with her friend Mary Dodd. Their book-display table features a new arrival: Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement. Kathryn and Mary are both dedicated suffragists, and they’re working with other women in town to organize an event in support of the Equal Suffrage Amendment to the state constitution, scheduled for a November vote. They meet under the guise of a women’s club dedicated to discussion of more “appropriate” subjects, such as “education, child labor, and library creation.” However, men in town form their own club to fight the amendment, and the community atmosphere becomes confrontational, especially during a July parade in which suffragists are met by hecklers. After Kansas voters approve the amendment, Kathryn, Mary, and her growing group of suffragists turn their attention to Washington, D.C., joining the March 1913 walk for voting rights during Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Reynolds parallels his primary narrative with Kathryn’s personal struggle: She was injured in a fall several years ago, which left her with a limp, and she’s determined to one day reach the summit of Sugar Loaf Hill. The author also effectively provides additional drama in a disturbing side plot about the marriage of one of Kathryn’s friends, which is scarred by infidelity and domestic violence. The overall character development is minimal, however, and the pace ambles a bit too casually. The most engaging section covers Kathryn’s yearlong participation in the picket line outside the White House fence, beginning in February 1917. Here, Reynolds’ prose becomes more impassioned as he describes the increasing violence the women faced; in November 1917, for instance, Kathryn is sentenced to two months in the Occoquan Workhouse, a hellhole where she is dragged, beaten, and handcuffed to a bar above her head: “Cries and moans echoed through the corridors into the night.”
An often compelling historical overview but an uneven drama.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73-509383-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Hadley Rille Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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