A disturbing, provocative, and vivid war tale that’s loaded with lesser-known historical details.
A World War II novel tracks the experiences of an ethnic German family living in Huntsville, Utah.
Karl and Marta Meyer joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany and then moved to Utah around 1919. Naturalized citizens, the German immigrants have two teenagers, Ella and her younger brother, Hank. Readers meet the family in 1939, together with Ella’s best friend, Billie Russell, and Hank’s new friend Chester Bailey. It is in these early pages that Toyn plants a harbinger of the trouble that will descend on the family in the years to come. Readers learn that Hank has a small suitcase that contains mementos (a Nazi Youth Movement uniform and a Nazi flag) from a childhood visit to his grandparents in Germany. After nicely establishing local period atmospherics, the author moves quickly to December 1941. Hank is a junior in high school; Ella is in nursing school; and Billie has become a civilian pilot. It is the morning of Dec. 7. Karl and Marta have returned from a German social club event and report that they left early in disgust when some Nazis took over the meeting. A few hours later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and America is at war. Four days later, Germany declares war on the United States. Much of Toyn’s absorbing narrative is devoted to a portrayal of the darker aspects of America’s war history, as depicted through parallel stories that feature Hank, Billie, and Karl and Marta after the couple are arrested as Nazi sympathizers and placed in internment camps. While Hank enlists in the Air Force and winds up in a violently abusive Austrian prisoner of war camp (Stalag 17-B), Billie becomes a high-flying Women’s Airforce Service Pilot, delivering newly minted planes to bases around the country. Billie’s tale is a vehicle for revealing the overt male pilot hostility, including sabotage, toward female aviators. The roundup and use of ethnic Germans in secret prisoner exchanges is verified by the author’s copious, annotated footnotes. Although highly informative, the embedded notes do disrupt the flow of an otherwise dramatically engaging and unsettling novel.
A disturbing, provocative, and vivid war tale that’s loaded with lesser-known historical details.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-98-184897-6
Page Count: 584
Publisher: American Legacy Media
Review Posted Online: July 28, 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
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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