An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.
With the American Civil War still raging, a South Carolina mother heads to the front line in Tennessee to bring home her severely injured son in Joslin’s historical novel.
It is late October, 1863, when Susannah Shelburne receives the telegram she has been dreading: Her son Francis, a Confederate soldier, has been wounded in battle. Jacob, her husband, is seriously ill, leaving her the only one who can travel to Tennessee to tend to Francis’ injuries and bring him back to Ardwyn, the family home. Susannah, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher, was only 15 years old when she married Jacob, who was 25 years her senior. He is also an abolitionist, and although he currently retains two Black servants (the elderly manservant Hawk and Letty, a personal maid to Susannah), Jacob pays them wages and has given them certificates of freedom, an arrangement necessarily kept secret from the neighbors. To Susannah and Jacob’s great dismay, Francis enlisted in the Confederate army the day he turned 18; he and his mother parted acrimoniously. Now, she heads out on the arduous journey to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, to the small farmhouse that serves as a makeshift field headquarters where Francis is located. They will spend the next five months there as she tends to his wounds, hoping to spare him the amputation of his leg. During these most difficult months of her life, she must also endure her son’s vitriol and vicious mockery. Nell’s novel is compellingly narrated by Susannah and set against the vivid backdrop of the physical, social, emotional, and familial devastations of the war. Composed in carefully textured prose filled with detailed, period-appropriate cultural minutia (“In his haversack, I found a scant handful of dried beans, another of corn kernels, and a few acorns—his sustenance for fighting all day on the side of a mountain”), the narrative reflects upon Susannah’s earlier heartbreaks even as she struggles through the current torrent of verbal abuse and physical assaults. Letty is a standout secondary character—when she eventually joins Susannah and Francis in the farmhouse, she offers support, love, hope, and critical homely wisdom in a voice seasoned by hardships.
An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781646036127
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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