This beguiling, slyly subversive tale puts a spiritual mystery at the heart of gritty truths.
A troublemaking teenager roils a rehab center in this novel of redemption.
It’s 1986, and the Second Chance Home for Girls in Texas imposes a 12-step doctrine and Christian exhortation on a dozen teens with histories of substance abuse and other failures to conform. The proprietor, Miss Sallyanne, presides over a regimen of chores, self-affirmation chants—“God loves me, and so do I!”—and group therapy sessions in which she pressures girls to reveal their sinful experiences with drugs and (usually abusive) sex. Those who don’t get with her program are sentenced to kneel in gravel or sleep chained in a doghouse. Into the snake pit comes Lorilee, around 17 years old, who is preternaturally self-possessed despite the needle tracks on her arms and her claim to have borne a son by her own brother. She breaks rules with impunity, knows secrets that she shouldn’t, flummoxes everyone with her blunt questions and unflinching gaze, and impudently corrects the Reverend, Sallyanne’s father, when his fire-and-brimstone sermon misstates the Bible. The braided narrative unwinds in the point-of-view voices of several residents of Second Chance. A chorus of girls condemns Lorilee as a stuck-up bitch; the seen-it-all cook, Starlene, thinks the teen is the devil; Summer, a quiet girl who writes everything in her diary, is both unnerved and inspired by Lorilee’s promise of forgiveness and freedom from her past, a vow that leads to violence. With its satire of a therapeutic culture that’s designed to subdue the victims of an inescapable patriarchy, Ostman’s yarn feels a bit like a distaff version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with a touch of Southern gothic. Ostman leavens the claustrophobic tension and air of eerie expectation at Second Chance with subtle humor and psychological insights—the chorus’s giddy encounter with an elusive pack of boys is a gem—all conveyed in pungent writing that’s good to chew on. In this passage, Starlene describes a run-in with Tad, Sallyanne’s brother: “His hand went to his chin, but then he swung fast at me. I ducked. So much for that Jesus talk, I see now. Just takes a woman saying no and the cussing starts. Right before the fists.” The result is an atmospheric yet entertaining read with an enigmatic, charismatic hero that will keep readers riveted.
This beguiling, slyly subversive tale puts a spiritual mystery at the heart of gritty truths.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73403-212-3
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Open Hand Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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