A lengthy but eventful character study that keeps its protagonist in jeopardy both on and off the battlefield.
Notchtree offers a military adventure novel about the making of a modern Russian soldier.
When readers first meet Maxym “Max” Ivanov, it’s the year 2000, he’s just 6 years old. He’s with his parents and sister when Chechen separatists brutally attack; Max hides, but the rest of his family is killed. Russian contract soldiers known as “kontraktnik” swiftly catch the perpetrators, and one of the soldiers offers young Max a gun so that he can seek immediate justice. Max does so, shooting all the captives and vowing to one day kill all the mujahedeen. One of the Russian soldiers, Leonid Nikolayevich, adopts the youngster and vows to take care of him. After Leonid is wounded in battle, he and Max move to the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. Aside from the fact that Max has killed several people and seems driven to kill more, he and Leonid live a fairly ordinary life. When the young man reaches puberty, he realizes that he’s gay; he later carries on a secret relationship with a boy named Andrei. When the two are caught having sex, it creates a scandal, and they are forced to sever all ties with each other. At the age of 17, Max joins a fighting force called Valhalla, and he proves to be highly skilled with firearms. In Valhalla, recruits live by such maxims as “your whole body is a killing machine.” Max goes on to participate in missions throughout the world; eventually, in 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurs, and he reflects on how he really doesn’t want “to join this Donbas mess and end up shooting at Ukrainians.”
The entire saga of Maxym Ivanov weighs in at more than 700 pages, and it’s a tale that progresses at an unhurried pace with a great deal of dialogue. For instance, when Max is young, he has an awful lot of questions; when he and Leonid are taking a trip to England, for instance, the youngster asks, “Can we meet the Queen?” Many of his queries, though, don’t add much to his character or to the overall progress of the story. Even in Max’s later years, he still has obvious queries, as when he says, in response to a comment about bank interest rates going up: “That means I get more in interest, doesn’t it?” Still, for readers, the heart of the matter is where this ferocious combatant will ultimately end up. The narrative builds excitement as he arrives in such locales as Northern Ireland and the Central African Republic. There’s plenty of action, as well: “A hail of bullets came his way, smashing into the masonry around.” One never knows what the next hot zone will have in store—or if his sexual orientation will attract dangerous attention. For example, he worries about what the Russian army, who threaten to conscript Max if he doesn’t volunteer for combat, will do if they find out that he’s gay. Such moments of tension give the story added suspense and momentum.
A lengthy but eventful character study that keeps its protagonist in jeopardy both on and off the battlefield.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798389763173
Page Count: 534
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
