Sometimes rabbit holes contain only rabbits.
A Dutch mother-to-be strives to vindicate her future child’s namesake.
Each chapter begins with a week-by-week countdown to the first-person narrator’s due date, which is also her deadline for finding out the truth about her “distant uncle” Frans. That narrator is Marjolijn van Heemstra herself, and this novel, van Heemstra’s second, is drawn directly from life. When she was 18, Marjolijn’s grandmother gave her Frans’ ring since he died without any descendants. In return, Marjolijn has agreed to name her firstborn son after Frans, a hero of the Dutch resistance. Years later (exactly how many is not clear), her pregnancy forces the issue; she is hormone- and conscience-driven to learn whether Frans’ name is worthy of being passed on. After the war, on Dec. 5, 1946, her uncle masterminded a bomb attack on a man named Boer, an alleged Nazi collaborator who was never punished. Frans was prosecuted and imprisoned for what, in peacetime, was a crime. Though preeclampsia threatens, Marjolijn takes furtive trips from her Amsterdam home to the National Archive in the Hague while her partner, D, is at work. The facts defy Marjolijn’s every effort to verify Frans’ heroism. Boer’s collaboration was considered de minimis—he rounded up pigeons for the Wehrmacht. The bomb, delivered in a wrapped package to Boer’s home on St. Nicholas Eve, also killed innocent bystanders, but, of this “collateral damage,” Frans remarked, “These things happen.” The supreme irony: Frans later founded a right-wing group with ties to ex-Nazis. The book is brutally honest about pregnancy, abortion, and living with ambiguity. Wry observations abound, well served by Reeder’s translation; for instance, on the archive’s proximity to a children’s book museum, van Heemstra says, “one wrong turn and you’re in the realm of fairy tales.” In view of the novel’s firm grounding in fact, one wonders why van Heemstra didn’t simply write a memoir. Perhaps because fiction accommodates any number of wrong turns. The novel ends with an existential shrug, but perhaps that’s the point.
Sometimes rabbit holes contain only rabbits.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982100-48-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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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