A lovingly researched tale whose rich setting and vivid scenery shine throughout.
Barr fictionalizes a historically significant stretch of time in the Persian Empire in this short historical novel.
In the author’s follow-up to Cocktails and Peacocks Feathers: An Anthology of Poetry (2024), readers are transported to 334 B.C.E. Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). Barr’s young protagonist, Andronicus, is a Macedonian man of ambition who’s recently married a woman named Idahlia. Searching for more than the simple existence they were born into, Andronicus and Idahlia leave their old home behind and venture into war-torn Asia Minor, ruled at the time by the inimitable Alexander the Great, who’s busy marshalling his troops to ransack and conquer the Persians, whom he believes have gotten “too comfortable.” As Alexander moves, so, too, do Andronicus and Idahlia, along with their poet friend Leo. They settle for a time in Persepolis in 330 B.C.E., where the pair make ends meet with simple work and bartering. Meanwhile, readers are introduced to Roxane, the daughter of Baron and Leila Oxyartes, the former a powerful authority in the region. Still just a child, Roxane fusses in the ceremonial wedding dress she’s forced to wear to marry her half brother, Shapur: “The old blue dress is itchy and Roxane imagines the tiny creatures that nibble away on its fabric, the same creatures that feast on her mother’s silk dresses that hang like faded flowers on the lichen-encrusted walls of their hut.” Such is the existence Roxane leads in Sogdia, a place where such weddings of convenience are commonplace. Things are not much better for Andronicus and Idahlia. Just as the couple’s hardscrabble existence finally begins to seem untenable, fate draws them toward a meeting with Roxane that will alter the course of their lives.
While Barr’s novel is sometimes more of a meandering period piece than a propulsive narrative, readers can easily forgive such lapses; on the whole, the author’s research and authority over the subject matter are impressive. Barr’s richly ambient descriptions and vivid landscapes transport readers to the harsh climes of these ancient Persian lands. This is no small feat, since the novel is set in a time so long past that conjuring it requires some truly imaginative flourishes in the prose, which Barr renders in often simple but delicately chosen details: “The cave they have chosen has been made welcoming. The brazier is Bah’s. It is fine, tall and highly polished, and its light is soft. The best carpets and furs have been laid around the cave’s interior. Roxane finds the basket. It is tall and of fine weave and inside are the fragrant oranges eaten only on special occasions.” True, readers may not find the sort of unforgettable characters who are often prized in historical fiction set in ancient times (Andronicus, while an apt narrator, is not especially striking), but Barr’s text is just short enough that the characters are able to carry the weight of the narrative through to the final pages.
A lovingly researched tale whose rich setting and vivid scenery shine throughout.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780473742614
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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