These well-wrought miniatures add up to an engrossing multifamily epic.
Generations of a small town’s families love, lose, and misunderstand each other across a century.
This insightful, often drily witty novel-in-stories is set in the town of Kinder Falls, in the New York state region known as the “burned-over district” because it was a center of religious fervor in the 19th century that birthed the Book of Mormon, the Shakers, and Spiritualism. These stories are set from 1906 to 2006, and their characters are shaken not by religion but by the desires, cruelty, and sometimes-surprising comfort common to the human experience. The first story, “Coaxing Sugar From the Trees,” is about Mavis Staunch, an independent young woman who refuses to sell her family land to the Epps brothers, who want to cut down the maple trees she taps to make a living. That refusal sets off a cascade of terrible events that leaves her dead and a boy named Harley Tuttle gripped in a lifetime of guilt. “The Stone House” finds Harley a grown man who works carving gravestones. An encounter with a suave bootlegger and his charming niece will change Harley’s life in shocking ways. “Galen, on the Clyde River” centers that niece, Lily, now living with Harley in 1938 in a nearby town and supporting them both as a palm reader. In another story, back in Kinder Falls, Harley’s sister Annalee plans to leave town forever with a gentleman full of promises. He’s not as clever as he thinks he is. The next group of stories jumps to the 1950s, picking up the lives of Mitchell Epps, descendant of those greedy brothers, and his wife, Carol, who are trying to be good parents to their angry, sex-crazed teenager Sharon. The stories move on through the generations to “The Final Girl,” set in 1994, with wild girl Sharon now a scary old drunk. She crosses paths with Marlena, a young single mother and descendant of the Staunch family. In the last story, “Six of Swords,” set in 2006, Lily, the palm reader, is over 90 and living amid her ghosts. All of these finely crafted stories are haunted, though, not just by the dead but by missed connections, bungled romances, and links broken between parents and children.
These well-wrought miniatures add up to an engrossing multifamily epic.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780814259542
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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