This whopper of a novel is perfect for readers who want to lose themselves in a long historical yarn.
The author of Shadows and Light (1984) and Wakefield Hall (1993) presents a remarkable 12th-century noblewoman’s journey from a French country estate to the side of the greatest queen of the Middle Ages.
“Never before had I seen a woman who was old…yet alluring. Her fair skin was wrinkled, but her vivid dark eyes, framed by a luxuriant expanse of brow, were still beautiful and bespoke an undaunted spirit.” That’s our first glimpse of the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine, English ruler and mother of rulers, in Stanfill’s lavishly detailed historical novel. That description is given to us by Isabelle, a brilliant young woman who tries and fails to fit the mold of baby-making machine that the age required. It’s disappointing that it takes 500 pages to get to this exciting encounter, but Stanfill amply fills the preceding pages with a portrait of the private struggles and desperation of aristocratic women like Isabelle who, despite their best efforts, fail to satisfy the ambitions of their husbands. For many, such failure left them with only two choices: going home to their parents or to an abbey. Isabelle eventually finds refuge in an abbey patronized by Queen Eleanor, who seeks a companion in old age. Not just anyone will do—Eleanor requires someone who can write, play chess, and keep up with her sparkling wit. Trained in the classics by her grandfather, Isabelle is the right person for that role. Eleanor’s life and the complicated relationship between England and France play in the novel’s background until fate brings the two characters together. All the exotic, romantic elements of the medieval world—falconry, ancient ruins, rustic healers, feasts by warm candlelight, ominous prophecies—are here as well as a frightening figure from Isabelle’s past, intent on ruining her and those she loves. Brave and defiant, Isabelle comes to understand that doing great things, as Eleanor has done, isn’t necessary to triumph in life. Sometimes, as she realizes about the old motto vincit qui patitur (“He conquers who survives”), the simple act of living is victory enough.
This whopper of a novel is perfect for readers who want to lose themselves in a long historical yarn.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307-422-4
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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