A feat of imagination that will please Connolly’s fans.
This dark fairy tale, sequel to The Book of Lost Things (2006), speaks volumes about a mother’s devotion.
Ceres, a single mother, keeps vigil over her 8-year-old daughter, Phoebe, after the child sustains a near-fatal head injury and enters a coma from which she may never recover. This world offers little hope, but there are “worlds upon worlds upon worlds.” So Ceres is driven by an aggressive ivy, “a creature of verdure and hate,” into a place of fairies and strange beasts. There, she is transformed physically into a 16-year-old girl, though she retains her 32-year-old mind. Threats abound from richly conceived creatures like the Crooked Man, whose “evil was without bounds” and who has a finger consisting of a “tangle of centipedes.” And there are the Fae, who abduct and feed on children. A few others are Pale Lady Death, the Spirit of the Water, and Calio, a perfectly camouflaged dryad who refers to themselves in the plural, as in “We are Calio.” And sprinkled among the pages are allusions to fairy tales, such as “Rapunzel” and “Red Riding Hood.” Ceres meets a circle of wicked witches confessing non-sins such as “It’s been five years since my last wickedness,” which sounds like an AA (WWA?) meeting. Ceres finds a strong and wise ally in the Woodsman, although she is hardly a damsel in distress. She is a strong mother who wants her daughter back. “Whatever it takes,” Ceres declares, “I want her returned to me.” But the Woodsman replies that “This world, like any other, doesn’t care what you want.” Curiously, Ceres refers to the previous book: “That novel, The Book of Lost Things, has become the basis for a fantasy world in which I now find myself stranded.” Readers may well wonder what some of the action has to do with reuniting the mother and child, but mom doesn’t lose sight of her goal.
A feat of imagination that will please Connolly’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781668022283
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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