An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.
A young man grows up to discover a connection to the paranormal in Deur’s debut novel.
As the story begins, 12-year-old Angelo Novakis haunted by thoughts of suicide by gun. Over the course of the novel, he not only confronts his own dark desires, but also bears witness to how such urges play out in others’ lives. As the tale follows Angelo from his youth to adulthood, it becomes a broader investigation of what makes his life meaningful. Early on, he has visions of himself as a knight fighting a shadowy opponent in a forest long ago; these visions soon inspire a long education in the occult. Angelo becomes versed in multiple religions and possible theories to explain his apparently fantastical experiences. The hero becomes a Platonic inquisitor as he challenges ideas that he encounters over the years—eventually writing a memoir of his visions called Somnia Praeterita. The novel’s second half is that very book, which concerns Luka Dragovic, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries; it turns out that Angelo has been having visions of events in Luka’s life ever since he was a child. Deur experiments with form in this novel, and the notion of a book within a book being the climax of a story is engaging. However, this experiment goes awry, as there are too many threads left untied in both halves of the book for it to feel like a unified whole. Although the opening of the novel teases Angelo’s self-destruction, in the end, he simply vanishes from the novel, with some parts of his story left incomplete and unresolved. Both sections, but especially the first half, suffer from overwriting, with large swaths of expository text where shorter scenes might have offered better illustrations of complex ideas; the book also tends to state its characters’ thoughts and feelings rather than showing them through action. Indeed, some sections simply feel like lists, and the dialogue often consists of wishful monologues and unrealistic diatribes rather than genuine conversation. There are definitely intriguing ideas here, but they’re lost in a sea of ramble.
An ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying coming-of-spirituality tale.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8677399909
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
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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