A vibrant celebration of identity and the push-pull between heritage and autonomy.
Three sisters coming of age in Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community navigate tradition, love, and self-discovery within the constraints of a tightknit religious world.
The novel opens as Fortune, the middle sister in the Cohen family, thinks about her upcoming wedding to Saul Dweck, a nice boy from the neighborhood who meets every expectation but stirs little passion. Fortune has been working as an office assistant at her father’s company, biding her time until marriage, as is expected. Her older sister, Nina, spends her days helping their mother with her thriving catering company. At 26, Nina’s already considered a spinster, yet she’s just beginning to think about what she might want from life. When a job at a record label falls in her lap, she grabs it, eager to taste independence beyond their insular community. Meanwhile, the youngest sister, Lucy, a senior at a local Jewish high school, has recently caught the eye of a highly eligible 30-year-old doctor named David, and nobody seems to mind their glaring age difference. As Nina and Lucy begin to challenge what’s expected of them, Fortune begins to wonder whether she has the courage to upend her safe, preordained future with Saul for something less certain, but perhaps far more satisfying. Told in alternating first-person narratives from each of the three sisters, the novel offers many evocative, chaotic, slice-of-life moments. From the savory smells of traditional dishes, to the sharp-edged banter among mother and daughters, the story is chock-full of vivid details and prose that brings the rhythms of this Syrian-American Jewish family to life. The relationship between Lucy and David, and the unequal power dynamic between this 18-year-old high schooler and a much older man, raises concerns that warranted greater attention, leaving a gap in an otherwise thoughtful portrayal of gender and tradition. Even so, this plot-driven novel deftly examines weighty themes like generational pressure, sisterhood, and quiet rebellion, creating an intimate, tender, and insightful portrait of women carving space for themselves in a world that offers them little room to breathe.
A vibrant celebration of identity and the push-pull between heritage and autonomy.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593734544
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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