A delightfully romantic tale that hits all the right Christmas notes.
In this novel, a single mother and an itinerant military bachelor get to know each other during one eventful holiday season.
Ava is well aware that she lives next door to an unusually attractive Navy officer. She has never done more than wave at him in passing, and that’s fine, because she’s totally focused on caring for her young son, who has health problems. She cannot afford to get distracted by something as frivolous as a romance. But then one day, when she’s bringing her son, Nicholas, home from school, her handsome neighbor, Harris, is building a snowman in his yard. A meddling female friend knew what time Ava would be returning home with Nicholas and concocted a reason why she needed Harris to construct a snowman. As expected, the young boy is desperate to join the fun. All it takes is one conversation between Harris and Ava, and everything begins to change. When Nicholas goes to his father’s house for Christmas, Harris and Ava have the holiday break to enjoy each other’s company. It will be a quick tryst before Nicholas returns and Harris relocates for his next assignment. Though wildly attracted to each other, when they begin to connect on a deeper level, they realize all the reasons why their relationship can never work. Told alternately from Harris’ and Ava’s perspectives, the story pokes fun at how easy it is to create a romance simply by participating in trite activities during the holiday season. At the same time, Aster cleverly utilizes each of these tropes to strengthen Ava and Harris’ attachment to each other. From snowball fights and ice skating to decorating trees and baking Christmas treats, no holiday-season milestone is neglected. Despite the lighthearted tone, the issues that Ava faces as the mother of an ill child are deep and complex, but the author handles them with grace and insight. Replete with witty banter, steamy sex scenes, and oodles of Christmas cheer, the book is engaging and compulsively readable. Despite the story’s clichéd setup and a few cheesy lines, Aster’s openly formulaic approach helps the novel achieve exactly what it set out to do.
A delightfully romantic tale that hits all the right Christmas notes.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-4916-6261-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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