A bold and remorseless debut about the agony and affection that are attendant to complicated families.
Attempts by adult sisters to extricate their mother from an abusive relationship force them to confront a shared trauma from their childhood.
The novel begins as Tanya and Nessa Bloom return to their hometown outside Boston to help their mother and stepfather prepare to move to New Hampshire. When the sisters, who are not nearly as close as they once were, arrive home, they are bewildered by what they find. Their mother, Lorraine, seems skittish and fragile; she’s gotten braces seemingly at random, and she’s overly deferential toward their stepfather, Jesse. These hints at domestic abuse quickly bear out, as Jesse grows angry at Lorraine and attacks her, even attempting to strangle her. After the daughters discover their bloodied mother and rush her to the hospital, Tanya encourages her to seek a restraining order. Nessa, who’s always had a soft spot for Jesse, tries to support Tanya’s plan, but she struggles to perceive her stepfather as a villain. Meanwhile, Lorraine grapples with her conflicting emotions for the man she can’t seem to stop loving. Nessa becomes a crutch, accepting her mother’s rationalizations for wanting to return to Jesse and angering Tanya, who only wants to see Lorraine escape immediately. As the sisters' already strained relationship deteriorates further, the author reveals a harrowing experience from their adolescence that continues to impact their feelings toward each other, toward men, and toward their mother. The characters face several difficult choices throughout the novel, and they repeatedly disappoint each other. Chapters alternate among the varying perspectives of all three women, and author Halperin expertly weaves scenes from the past into the present to build a more complete world. She also dives deep into the confused, reckless thoughts that can permeate adolescence. The characters are unflinchingly honest as they explore their emotions in a manner that is both refreshing and haunting. The novel is similarly unapologetic as it tackles difficult questions about abusive relationships, toxic secrets, and romantic and familial betrayals. While certain subplots do little to advance the narrative, this difficult story is sufficiently high stakes and relentless that it remains gripping throughout.
A bold and remorseless debut about the agony and affection that are attendant to complicated families.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-98-488206-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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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