Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.
Honey can be a salve or a sweetener but, as Han illustrates so vividly, not all wounds can be healed by the oft-employed Korean folk remedy.
Han explores the dehumanizing practice of sexual enslavement in a narrative that employs realism of both the stark and the magical kind as she follows several generations of Korean women through perilous times. Beginning with the story of twins, Geum-Ja, a girl, and Geum-Jin, a boy, born in a mountainous region of Korea in 1902, Han traces the increasingly malignant effects of Japanese occupation. Thirteen-year-old Geum-Ja, who mysteriously disappears from the family’s compound one night, assumes the form of a tiger and exerts power and protection over her family in that guise. Geum-Jin grows up in her absence and goes on to get married and father three children, but his family is brutalized by Japanese soldiers in a raid on their home in 1931. The only apparent survivor is his daughter Song Young-Ja, whose heartbreaking story forms the core of the saga. A childless couple opens their home to Song Young-Ja but she is molested by the husband and then sent away by the wife. A demeaning job in a teahouse—a hotbed of gossip and espionage—evolves over time. Still, Song Young-Ja’s constrained but relatively safe existence comes to a cruel end in 1941 when she is captured by Japanese soldiers and transported to a camp where women serve as sex slaves. Her experiences are brutally recounted in corrosive detail. Song Young-Ja subversively employs her own supernatural ability to incorporate her emotional state into the foods she prepares but still suffers incalculable harm. Decades pass before the injuries suffered by the enslaved women are publicly acknowledged. It is with the aid of Song Young-Ja’s young granddaughter—who harbors a mysterious ability of her own—that she begins to confront her past. Han has incorporated extensive research into a revelatory work of harrowing fiction.
Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781668202166
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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