An ambitious novel hampered by its convoluted structure.
In Chawla’s multigenerational family saga, a girl born to a Muslim mother and a Hindu father reflects on the turmoil of her home city of Ayodhya, India.
Saanvi Trivedi is born on December 6th, 1992, the same day the Babri Masjid, an important 16th-century mosque, is demolished by Hindu extremists. In place of the mosque, the Hindus intend to build a temple to the god Rama. Because she was born to a Muslim mother, Yasmin Khan, and a Hindu father, Ramesh Trivedi, her birth bucks the ages of conflict that characterize Ayodhya. Her father, an academic who eventually pivots to politics, met and fell in love with her mother, a poet, in Lucknow, India; the two eloped in a clandestine marriage in a small Hindu temple. Ramesh and Yasmin are both the children of politicians and activists on opposite sides of the Babri Masjid / Ram temple debate; Yasmin’s father is a Muslim organizer who is galvanized into action after the killing of his son by a Hindu mob, while Ramesh’s father helped spearhead the movement to build the Ram temple. Yasmin learns that her own mother converted to Islam and was disowned by her family for marrying a Muslim man. As Saanvi uncovers family histories, her relationship with her parents is tested when her father becomes involved in the Hindu Party, against the wishes of both Saanvi and her mother. In these interwoven family narratives, Chawla establishes a very rich sense of place in Ayodhya. The author tackles grief and silence elegantly; the most memorable passages are about Yasmin and her mother coming to terms with the now-empty room of her late brother. But as a whole, the novel is hampered by its nonlinear, often repetitive storytelling; the same event—Saanvi’s birth—gets replayed over and over again, while Saanvi as a character remains opaque. (“My heart was pungent with a very complex mix of emotions,” she muses, rather vaguely.) The novel is about turmoil, but it offers little insight into the person underneath the murky tidepool of conflicting allegiances.
An ambitious novel hampered by its convoluted structure.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781965784280
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2026
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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