A darkly immersive coming-of-age story set on the hazardous coast of Cornwall.
Baker brings the world of the 19th-century wrecking industry to life in this historical novel.
The village of St. Rose in Cornwall, England, sustains itself on a peculiar trade: salvage. The law says that when a ship smashes on the treacherous rocks off the coast, whoever can grab its contents, either from the sea or from the shore, is the new rightful owner—if everyone aboard the ship is dead. This leads to macabre practices, even by children, such as 14-year-old Hannah Pendarves and her younger siblings, who find a still-living man on the beach and promptly bash in his head so they can loot his pockets. Only later does Hannah learn that dead man hadn’t been swept in from a ship at all, but was a gentleman of some importance whose murder is of interest to the constable. The teen feels no guilt for taking the man’s life—she views anyone not from St. Rose as a “foreigner” and therefore undeserving of empathy—but she’d prefer not to bring the eyes of the law on wreckers’ work. When Hannah’s father, salvager Hap Pendarves, is convinced by his new wife to get Hannah out of the house, he places his daughter as a servant (and spy) in the home of Falmouth shipping agent, Francis Keverne, who turns out to be related to the man she murdered. Hannah’s time outside the community of St. Rose soon has her wondering if the kill-and-steal ethic is really the best way to live. Over the course of this novel, Baker masterfully recreates the salt and grit of the period. This extend to the wreckers’ dialect, which is generally clear and straightforward, if occasionally confusing: “Tain’t that,” Hannah says, expressing her father’s intention to wed a local widow. “The Widdy Chegwidden is out of mourning today. He’s after marrying she.” Most impressive, though, is the author’s rendering of the violent, clannish culture of the Cornwall wreckers, which, over the course of Hannah’s journey, is engagingly portrayed from both the outside and inside.
A darkly immersive coming-of-age story set on the hazardous coast of Cornwall.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781778066382
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Stories All the Way Down
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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