An uneven but often compelling multigenerational family drama mixed with small-town scandal.
A man uncovers secrets after unexpectedly inheriting a fortune in Wilson’s debut novel.
Forty-one-year-old Tim Barlow is content with his life as a high school history teacher in tiny Frenchtown, New Jersey, where he lives with his girlfriend and modest expectations. He’d never heard of wealthy local antiques dealer McCallister Paisley until he discovered his bludgeoned corpse while taking a walk. He’s understandably astonished when he finds out that the deceased left him $35 million. It seems that Paisley, who was gay, had no children and researched his family history to choose an heir; intrigued, Tim reviews these varied documents, which make up much of the novel and span centuries and continents. The first is a journal written by Australian-born Suzannah Hard from about 1835 to 1845. She met Sgt. Tom Pasley (the original spelling of the family name) in Hong Kong; Tom, who contributes his own narrative, eventually sets up a successful foundry in London, England. Their daughter, Alice, who was born in 1850, was disinherited after scandalously eloping to America. Suzannah and Tom’s other child, Frederick, has his own family line that also led to the United States; his granddaughter Nelle became a surgeon and later returned to England, endured the Blitz, and immigrated to Nebraska. Yet another narrative is written by David Barlow, Alice’s grandson and Tim’s father, who recounts how he met Tim’s mother, Michiko, in Japan after World War II. Meanwhile, back in the modern day, Tim goes on to learn that his inheritance is tangled up in political corruption and an array of other criminal activities.
Over the course of his debut novel, Wilson traces the ripple effects of money, ambition, love, and shame across several generations. Along the way, he marshals well-chosen details and distinctive voices for the various narratives, which feel convincingly appropriate to their historical periods. Suzannah, for example, writes with early Victorian formality; in her account of walking along a Hong Kong dock, she writes, “wasn’t an easy trip, for many times, we had to stop; so great was the press of humanity.” Kaitlin’s mode of expression effectively reflects her rougher, midcentury American upbringing: “Course I coulda asked my pa for a lift, but that woulda been a total joke.” Each document also includes episodes of excitement, passion, or both, as when Tom faces betrayal by a fellow soldier in Hong Kong who nearly kills him and leaves him with a fortune in gems or when Nelle has a torrid love affair in Hobart that ends dramatically. At another point, it’s revealed that one family member became a drug addict and an accessory to murder. Overall, the historical sections prove to be the most successful parts of the book; Tim is a far less intriguing character than his ancestors, and he comes off as rather colorless compared to the moral squalor that surrounds him in the New Jersey town, which is somewhat melodramatically portrayed. The story is slowed, too, by repetition and unnecessary detail.
An uneven but often compelling multigenerational family drama mixed with small-town scandal.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-654706-7
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
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
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