Fans of Paula McLain and Marie Benedict will enjoy this insightful novel.
In Mickelwait’s historical novel, a woman from New York society embraces France during the Jazz Age.
In 1905, highborn Sara Sherman Wiborg dreams of a life beyond the rigid confines of Gilded Age New York society. She finds her soulmate in Gerald Murphy. He is wealthy, but his family is “in trade” (they own a company that sells luxury goods), and, at age 27, he is five years younger than Sara. Although the union is opposed by both families, they marry in 1915. They agree “to find and celebrate beauty in even the smallest things.” A daughter they name Honoria is born in 1917, followed by two sons, Baoth in 1919 and Patrick in 1920. After some time at Harvard, where Gerald studies landscape architecture, the couple rejects Prohibition and “the commercial, Puritanical vengeance of American society.” The family moves to France. Fully embracing the Jazz Age, their lively social circle includes Cole Porter, Fernand Léger, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sara and Gerald relish the freedom they’ve sought for themselves and their children in Paris and the Cap d’Antibes. As the 1920s end, personal and societal crises upend their lives: Baoth dies of meningitis and Patrick of tuberculosis, and the 1929 stock market crash and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini hasten a move back to the United States. Sara struggles with the knowledge that Gerald is gay, but their harmonious perspectives, love for each other, and grief over the deaths of their sons keep them together. In her first novel, Mickelwait illuminates the life of a woman who is an afterthought among the outsized personalities of the time, especially Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who unflatteringly portray her in their work. (Sara’s own abilities are overshadowed as she supports Gerald and creates a rich, loving life for her children, but she unflinchingly embraces the messiness of existence.) Mickelwait’s descriptions effectively evoke the time and place: “Paris was a living, breathing organism in which fresh ideas were floating on the air waiting to be grabbed, like drunken birds.”
Fans of Paula McLain and Marie Benedict will enjoy this insightful novel.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798888246917
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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