A very sensitive, well-written treatment of a trying time and those who lived it.
It’s 1969 in Bice’s novel, and mandated busing has come to the Richmond, Virginia, schools.
The Randolphs are a White, middle-class Catholic family. Eleanor’s father is a lawyer. Nell, as she’s known, has an older brother, Donald, and a tightly wound mother, Marjorie. In the fall, Nell will be bused to Stonewall High, which is almost all Black and underfunded. Nell isn’t comfortable there but is determined to make the best of it and perhaps even to make some Black friends. She gets a small part in the fall play. The cast of Carousel is experimentally integrated, but when a Black-cast Billy Bigelow kisses a White-cast Julie Jordan, half the audience walks out and the local paper throws a fit. At semester’s end, Nell’s mother finds her a slot at a private White school, St. Mary’s. The nuns are racist (Nell, to her relief, is expelled), her classmates, clueless privileged snobs. She winds up, also to her relief, back at Stonewall. Nell’s father is a good man, trying to make the best of this situation and do the morally right thing. Her mother is not overtly racist, but she almost vibrates at this imposition, this disruption of her orderly, traditional life. Nell does make some Black friends, but those friendships are really fragile. We learn the story through Nell’s eyes, and a finely drawn character she is (as are others, especially the problematic Marjorie). We learn in the author blurb that Bice lived through that time as student and teacher, and her experiences inform every confrontation, every confusion. It’s important that in the epilogue, Nell is recalling in adulthood what she lived through and learned from. Thus, she can look back and trenchantly say, “My curated life was about to be challenged.” In the end, Nell can agree with Fergy Sutton, her Black almost-boyfriend, that the future is not without hope for the long haul but must be faced without rosy expectations for the short term.
A very sensitive, well-written treatment of a trying time and those who lived it.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63988-098-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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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