An immersive historical novel adeptly translated from Italian.
An exiled noble seeks his revenge in the second volume of Riggio’s translation of Natoli’s classic Italian adventure novel.
Palermo, 1714: The united forces of church and state are attempting to root out the clandestine brotherhood of the Beati Paoli, whose democratic subversions threaten the status quo. The Church goes so far as to institute an inquisition against the secret society, marching suspected members through the streets and subjecting them to torture and death. The Duke of Motta, Don Raimondo Albamonte, only holds his title due to the treachery he committed against his infant nephew 16 years earlier. The Beati Paoli consider the duke as one of their enemies, going so far as to kidnap his daughter, Violante, from her bedroom one night. Luckily for Violante, the young and handsome cavaliere Blasco da Castiglione rescues her from her kidnappers. Though Blasco is aligned with the Beati, he still feels loyalty toward the duke and his family…that is, until Blasco discovers that he is the rightful heir to the title and its lands. But will he fight to regain his birthright if it means endangering those he feels compelled to protect? The future of Sicily may hang in the balance. Riggio’s translation preserves the novel’s ornate period style (the work began appearing in serialized installments in 1909) without sacrificing vitality or momentum, as evidenced here where Blasco speaks to his mentor, the cunning Coriolano della Floresta: “Dear friend, I am led to believe that fate is the great mastermind of human events and that the philosophers, who trouble themselves to teach us how to behave in this or that manner in order to achieve this or that result, are true charlatans. Life is about the unexpected.” Readers will be reminded of the novels of Alexandre Dumas, but Natoli offers a magic all his own, crafting a labyrinthine Palermo of scheming officials and masked rogues. This and the preceding volume are musts for any fan of Italian literature, or of early 20th century adventure novels.
An immersive historical novel adeptly translated from Italian.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781635769463
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2024
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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