An engaging Homeric tale of a man’s island-hopping quest to find his mother.
A historical novel offers an episode in the life of a Micronesian mariner.
Ever since he was a small boy, Ḷainjin heard tales about his long-absent mother. The story goes that Tarmālu led her fleet of valuable proa boats away from the island of Rālik to keep them from being destroyed in a storm, and neither she nor her proas were ever seen again. Since he’s been old enough to search for her, Ḷainjin has done just that, sailing his canoe from island to island, looking for news of any survivors from her fleet. Now he’s attempting his most ambitious mission yet: a multiday voyage to the far island of Pohnpei, accompanied by no one except his pet bird, the Chief. There, a new friend, Ewalt, takes him to the magnificent stone village rising from a reef just off the coast. “To view these massive, angular shafts emerging from the water was to worship them in awe at their grandeur,” thinks Ḷainjin. “Surely, this was the center of the ocean. Surely, this was the apex of his water world.” In the village, Ḷainjin hears of the Seekers, four survivors from Rālik who work for the lord of Pohnpei, scavenging large logs from the sea. He also hears of his mother’s capture by cannibals on the distant island of Papua. Can Ḷainjin convince the Seekers to help him discover his mother’s fate? In this prequel to Man Shark(2019), Knight’s prose displays a detailed knowledge of Micronesian culture, architecture, and seafaring techniques: “They glided swiftly across the reef toward the landing, sinking through the shallow troughs and rising on the whitecapped swells that rolled past them and crashed ahead into the entangled mangrove swamp on their right and the rocky shore to the fire-flicked village on the left.” The book takes its time getting started, and the author does not always provide the full context for everything (though he does offer footnotes explaining the frequent Micronesian words). But the novel’s mindset is so thoroughly pre-modern that readers can’t help but be swept up in Ḷainjin’s journey, learning to appreciate the poetry of the atolls, reefs, woods, stones, boats, and even the myriad types of waves.
An engaging Homeric tale of a man’s island-hopping quest to find his mother.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-77180-508-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
