A rich, engrossing portrait of a mother and daughter fencing their way toward a truce.
A woman’s life collapses after she reconnects with her brilliant but cold mother in Gentin’s knotty novel of broken families.
Jessica Harmon, an unhappy 30-year-old book editor in New York City, breaks out of her rut in the worst possible way by quitting her job and breaking up with her perfect boyfriend when his marriage proposal triggers her fear of commitment. Seeking the roots of her dysfunction, she accompanies her poetry professor mother, Cynthia, on a nationwide tour after she wins a coveted prize for her new collection of verse. Cynthia is a great poet who wows fans with her readings, but her daughter knows her as “the most self-obsessed person ever to walk the halls of academia or the streets of the Upper West Side.” When Jessica was younger, Cynthia told her a dubious story about her father getting killed by falling debris before she was born; brought home a parade of lovers; left her with the housekeeper while gallivanting across Europe; and, worst of all, discouraged Jessica’s literary aspirations: “‘You’re a competent writer.’ She paused. ‘Talent?’ Cynthia answered her own question with a shrug.” Then Cynthia is felled by a debilitating stroke, which prompts a reboot of Jessica’s life as she cares for her mother, rekindles a romance with a college flame, and investigates her parentage and Cynthia’s traumatic freshman year at Yale. Gentin’s yarn centers on an intriguingly conflicted mother-daughter duo—both prickly, proud, insecure, and secretly wounded. Cynthia’s transformation is gripping as she goes from someone with an intimidating command of language to a person whose brain can barely summon words to express thoughts. Gentin conveys the pair’s story in vivid, evocative, sensual prose, as when Jessica observes Cynthia’s hypnotic effect on both men and women: “it was Cynthia’s body language that mesmerized….with a penetrating glance, a slight tilt of her hips, or the momentary brush of her fingertip on her breast—so fleeting you thought you’d imagined it, except your mouth is dry and you can barely swallow.” Readers will root for Jessica to emerge from Cynthia’s shadow—and forgive her, as well.
A rich, engrossing portrait of a mother and daughter fencing their way toward a truce.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781645386209
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Ten16 Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
© 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.
