A thrilling work about a political crisis; original and gripping.
A struggling farmer turns into a national figure when he dramatically chooses to become a faithless elector in this novel.
Chance Fitzbourne inherited a Virginia farm when he was only 35 years old, land that had been in his family for generations and that he proudly cherished. Now 67, he’s exhausted from the demands it imposes and the financial precariousness of the industry. He feels swallowed up by the avarice and corruption of the world, a melancholic depletion poignantly depicted by Willis: “There’s too much unknown with farming. Like with most things, the big guys have taken over. They have lobbies, money, and government support. The big guys rule the world.” But in the midst of Chance’s powerlessness, he’s given an opportunity to make a difference. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, he’s appointed as an elector for his district, a role that typically only requires the perfunctory rubber-stamping of the winner. But then Democratic President-elect John Vickers suddenly collapses and dies, and the Electoral College process is thrown into confusion and disarray. Chance suddenly becomes a singularly important man after Democratic National Committee Chairman Edwin Damson chooses Sen. Brock Henry instead of throwing his support to Vice President-elect Jane Meyer Grete. Chance strenuously objects to Henry’s brand of radical socialism and considers the lawmaker a “bigoted ass,” refusing to cast his vote for him. Damson, an unscrupulous man, is maniacally intent on changing Chance’s mind, even if that means resorting to intimidation. The author vividly captures the chaos into which the nation descends, including the possibility that the other faithless electors who follow suit were bribed and the White House is somehow involved in a related murder.
Willis builds a suspenseful political drama around a tantalizing premise that proves ingenious because it is both eminently plausible and one on which the Constitution is silent. As a consequence, he delicately exposes the fragility of the democratic process and the rule of law. Furthermore, he avoids sullying the literary execution of this idea with politically partisan ax-grinding—there is plenty of dark corruption on both sides of the ideological aisle. At the heart of the story, though, is Chance’s embittered frustration, expressed in terms provided by the political moment but with deeper roots. Speaking to the Democratic county chairperson, he unleashes his disgruntlement: “I’ve backed the Party for forty-some-odd years, Gwen Ellen. Really voted for some sad candidates. Fortunately, the Republicans haven’t been any better. Politicians get rammed down our throats, qualified or not. I can’t swallow Brock Henry, simple as that.” The author’s irreproachable realism starts to waver toward the end of the story, and some blandly sentimental scenes meant to make readers feel good sneak in incongruently. Nevertheless, this momentary loss of literary nerve doesn’t come close to undermining a thoroughly captivating novel that is as politically astute as it is emotionally affecting.
A thrilling work about a political crisis; original and gripping.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-79553-9
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
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