An impressively researched but emotionally unengaging historical novel.
In Hirschmann’s debut historical novel, a young sailor contends with a dangerous captain on a voyage to Alaska.
The Eclipse sets sail from Boston in 1801, heading out into an ocean still dominated by the British Navy, who are only too happy to conscript American sailors into their war against Napoleon. Eclipse captain Jonathan Fletcher is young and brash, and his 11-man crew is even younger. Second Mate Joshua Hall distrusts the captain’s recklessness, but like First Mate Micah Triplett, Joshua is obligated to follow the captain’s orders, even when he disagrees. Besides, Joshua must focus on his true reason for signing on with the voyage, beyond merely acquiring otter pelts in the Pacific Northwest to sell in China: He’s investigating the fate of another ship, captained by his rebellious brother, Elias, that disappeared along the northwest coast the year before. After two sailors are lost in a storm while rounding Cape Horn, the crew takes on replacements in Hawaii—despite the taboo against such things, the recruits include Fletcher’s and Triplett’s Hawaiian paramours. To be fair, the women as skilled sailors, particularly Fletcher’s “wahine,” Alamea. It’s under these fraught conditions that the Eclipse arrives on the shores of Alaska, where the dangerous fur trade is pursued by competing Russian trappers, powerful Indigenous clans, and conniving British and American crews. Joshua’s rescue of a young slave from captivity wins him Alamea’s affection, which he cannot help but return: “Her graceful presence and manner only added to an overpowering, if not disquieting attraction that he was beginning to realize could never be defeated, only contained, though for how long he was uncertain.” However, Fletcher’s increasingly erratic behavior must be contended with if Joshua hopes to find his brother or make it back to Boston alive.
The author, a history professor, is well acquainted with the conditions of the time, and his text is rich with wonderful period details, as when the crew of the Eclipse prepares to trade for pelts with the Haida people of Prince of Wales Island: “Further down the deck, Lavelle Clark prepared his blacksmithing forge, ready to accommodate any villagers’ requests to make or refashion copper and iron goods. Kekoa held two young white and orange cats high on his shoulders to catch the eyes of otter pelt-owning villagers desiring a pet.” Hirschmann succeeds in communicating the harshness of the era through the youth of the sailors, their distance from home, the general lawlessness of the time, and the ruthless exploitation of local populations. Stopovers in remote places like the Juan Fernandez Islands drive home the far-flung geography of the Age of Sail. The author displays less skill when it comes to crafting personalities to populate this world; Joshua’s pat heroism is neither compelling nor terribly believable. The other characters are just as thin, including the native Hawaiians and Tlingits sailing with the crew. It’s a shame, as the reader is curious to see the effect such harrowing conditions—battles, storms, duels, months at sea—would have on people of diverse perspectives. An impressively researched but emotionally unengaging historical novel.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781684920518
Page Count: 286
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2023
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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