Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.
A bildungsroman of middle age about a 47-year-old goat farmer; her aging, beloved husband; and her high school best friend turned lover, set amid the lush fields of western Massachusetts.
Lucy Richard (that’s “Ree-SHARD,” from her French Canadian forebears) calls Edin, Massachusetts, home again after more than two decades in happy exile while her husband, Michael Mancini, taught at Columbia and she worked in the university’s communications office. Their return to Edin goes as badly as Adam and Eve’s: Michael begins to exhibit signs of dementia and Lucy learns that running her father’s farm requires reserves no one person has. As a year passes, joys and troubles ebb and flow like the nearby Connecticut River: The goats freshen and kid, Michael requires more care, Lucy’s friend Alexandra “Sandy” Stevens moves to the area to sell solar-power packages, and they tumble into the passionate love they’d shied away from as teenagers. Since Acker edits a literary magazine, The Common, celebrating the importance of place, it’s fitting that her novel derives so much heft from descriptions of everything from asparagus beds to frozen winter soil to the annual joy of new baby goats. Astute readers may guess how Lucy moves forward, but that matters very little. This is a novel about the journey; Lucy and her chosen family face relationships ending, corporate takeovers, homophobia, debilitating illness, elder abuse, and financial precarity while pitching in to repair fences, rescue sick animals, give each other business ideas, and occasionally relax for a few hours of laughter and good, locally sourced food. Amid all this activity is a tale about where the truest love and loyalty lies for a woman in her late 40s. At one point, frustrated by many things, Lucy tries to start a fire. “I have better wood downstairs,” she thinks, “but I’m terribly, defiantly determined to succeed with what I have, wood I never should have brought upstairs in the first place.” It’s the perfect metaphor to illustrate both Lucy herself and the pioneer spirit of the Pioneer Valley.
Come for the human drama, stay for the goatish antics, or vice versa, in this bighearted tale of paradise forged.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781953002716
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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