An impressive story that tackles familiar themes with skill.
In Handeland’s historical novel, a young man and his younger sister try to make sense of the political and social whipsaw that is the Vietnam War.
In 1967, teenager Billy Johnson from Willow Creek, Wisconsin, enlists in the military to head off to the Vietnam War—spurred by government propaganda, but even more by his grandfather’s urging that he make a man of himself. His 17-year-old sister, Jay, is left at home with the “Four Musketeers”: she and Mags, Ronnie Fredrick, and Helen Murphy, her friends since preschool. On the train to basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana, Billy, who’s White, meets Terrell Jones, a young Black draftee from Chicago. They go on to fight alongside each other in Vietnam and become fast friends. When a soldier on patrol takes a Polaroid of Billy standing on the first person he’s killed, Billy sends it to his grandfather, who’s excited about it—but the teen is having regrets about joining up. Back home, Jay is beginning to courageously question the prevailing pro-war opinion in Willow Creek. She’s helped by Paul, a new student and anti-war activist at her high school. Over the course of the story, the beliefs of both Billy and Jay evolve. Many readers, and especially those who lived through that time, may be unimpressed by the prospect of yet another Vietnam War drama. However, they’ll be slowly drawn in by Handeland’s handling of details and nuances; it also makes clear that jingoistic, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic characters like Billy’s grandfather are not caricatures, but truly did, and do, exist. There’s some evocative writing, such as this line about everyday life on patrol: “They listened to the same birds, got bit by the same bugs; they smelled the same stink of sweat and mud and rot.” Readers will eventually realize that that this is a story not of political issues, but of personal loyalties: Billy’s to his platoon and Jay’s to the other Musketeers. Overall, it’s an arresting and moving lesson in integrity.
An impressive story that tackles familiar themes with skill.Pub Date: March 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798986966489
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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