An ambitious novel about the possibility of redemption within families.
A patriarch’s death causes a reckoning for his troubled children in Lipinski’s debut literary novel.
Dawn Udell is back in her hometown of Tulsa to attend the funeral of her semiestranged father, a prominent local pastor. A struggling LA screenwriter, she happens to be in the middle of writing a television pilot about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—an event to which her White family has a murky connection. Tension with her father over an interracial crush in high school is what sent her west in the first place. Now, her father’s death reunites her with her two siblings whose lives are no simpler for having remained in town. Her sister, Sheila, is a hospice worker who has become reliant on pills. She’s also been carrying on an affair with the married son of one of her dying patients. Her brother, Andrew, followed their father to the pulpit…and also into infidelity. His marriage is on the rocks since his wife discovered his most recent affair, and he’s unsure how to repair his image in the eyes of the gossips in his congregation. To distract himself, Andrew has been researching his great aunt Kitty Harrison, a 1930s communist and labor activist. The story is told by each of the four in turn, Kitty included, in flashbacks—revealing how each of them is haunted in different ways. “You don’t know what it’s like being stuck here, ghosts all around you,” Sheila says to Dawn at one point. “Of course, I know what it’s like,” she responds. “That’s why I left.” Can this funeral serve to exorcise the ghosts not only of the siblings’ childhood, but of their family’s sins going back to the dark beginnings of Tulsa’s racial history? It’s a tall order, but it may be the only way to survive the weekend.
Lipinski’s prose is smooth and surprising, insightfully probing uncomfortable images and emotions: “It was startling how much his face resembled a finely sculpted wax effigy more than the father she’d seen last about two years ago at Christmas….This was what death looked like. Flesh left behind, like a tree cut down. She took a deep breath, relieved to find the room smelled antiseptic and clean.” The siblings are compellingly messy. Each starts out truly unlikable and slowly wins the reader over (mostly) as the origins of their dysfunctions are revealed. The dysfunction carries over into the larger portrait of Tulsa—a city that Lipinski summons with unexpected vibrancy—and its fraught history. Dawn expresses some ambivalence about whether or not the Tulsa Race Massacre is a story she should be telling, and it’s clear the author has considered such topics as well. To the extent that the book is about racism, it is about White people attempting to grapple with racism within their own families—as well as a host of other unsavory tendencies that seem to spill over from one generation to another. The novel succeeds in dramatizing the attempt, at least, and does so with a cast of flawed and vivid characters.
An ambitious novel about the possibility of redemption within families.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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