Like panning for gold; there are moments that gleam with brilliance.
A mother and daughter rekindle their relationship as they search for buried treasure.
Bea Macon makes a living foreseeing disasters. Her job as a commodities analyst in New York demands that she predict and profit from floods, hurricanes, and droughts, all of whose seemingly imaginary consequences occur far from the desk she rarely leaves. When Bea prophesies a storm that never arrives, she’s visited instead by a slew of personal disasters: HR, the feds, termination, blacklisting. Alone and unemployed, Bea buys a one-way ticket to her last resort—her mother. Although Bea approved the house in Salt Lake City and pays its rent, it’s her first visit, and the first time the two have lived together since Bea was 13 years old. Bea and her mother, Christy, stiffly get in and out of each other’s way in the manner of those lacking true intimacy. Both women tread society’s surfaces, bereft of any substantive ties to anchor them, including with one another. Living in proximity seems only to reveal that they are strangers. Christy is a character, not a caretaker. When Bea was 13, Christy followed her husband to Canada in pursuit of divorce papers, only to end up living with him, his new girlfriend, and their son for the following years while Bea traversed middle and high school without her. Bea finds her mother’s resourcefulness embarrassing, her optimism foolish. Chief among Christy’s totems of naïve optimism is her map: She’s an avid member of an online forum called the Conversation, whose devotees plumb the wilderness in search of an alleged treasure hidden by a recluse dubbed the Poet. When the mother-daughter duo is evicted, Bea decides to tag along on Christy’s trip to a town called Mercy and accompany (and heckle) her mother on the next leg of her journey. Bea and Christy’s adventure is marked by shady characters, dizzying desert heat, and the kind of disasters Bea can neither predict nor prevent. This depiction of a mother-daughter relationship is agonizingly apt, proof that mothers can, at times, bring out the best in their children; they do bring out the worst. A slow-to-start book eventually results in rich, vivid characters. Gasps of gorgeous prose are weighed down by occasionally plodding plot points.
Like panning for gold; there are moments that gleam with brilliance.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834480
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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