An engaging, tender tale of two people uncovering the truth about the world, each other, and themselves.
In Graham’s novel, a man travels to France to settle the estate of his recently deceased aunt and encounters more than he bargained for.
Carl Box calls it “a bit of mischief” when he learns that Aunt Lillian has left him land in France upon her apparent death. He doesn’t want to travel at all, much less for someone he barely knows, and what little he does know of his aunt suggests she was estranged from the family for unclear reasons. When he arrives in Paris, he does all of the right things; he goes to her apartment and searches for information. After retrieving her ashes, Carl learns three things about his aunt: She is, in fact, alive; she’s being pursued by a mysterious killer; and she’s been smuggling KGB documents from Moscow to Paris to use as leverage to free her lover from wrongful imprisonment in a psychiatric institution. She has, along with faking her own death, selected her nephew to lend credibility to this ruse, but once he becomes a suspect in her murder, Lily gets him to help her gather information and escape certain death. Graham folds these larger-than-life events together masterfully, using humorous dialogue and specific details to bring readers into the world and make it real. Her vivid descriptions make easy work of picturing each situation and place: “Billy had taken to his Prussian blue dog bed like an overwrought lady in a Victorian melodrama.” Likewise, Graham does a remarkable job of building suspense throughout her novel, and each section comes with both new questions and answers, continually giving readers fresh developments to ponder. Additionally, the cast’s voices infuse levity and personality into the text. For example, in response to Carl revealing that the police suspected him to be Lily’s killer, she replies nonchalantly: “‘But of course you didn’t,’ she said soothingly while spooning potatoes onto [Carl’s] plate.” These parts swirl together to create a striking balance of excitement, humor, and sincerity, perfect for anyone seeking a lively, twisty adventure.
An engaging, tender tale of two people uncovering the truth about the world, each other, and themselves.Pub Date: May 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798992174724
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Vendome Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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