The novel fires on all senses with an earthy, frank heroine who’s riveting to know and impossible to forget.
A reissued novel from a wildly original writer explodes the form with a sensual exposé of midlife.
Lavinia is 36, restless and judgmental in London or Venice but truly herself in woods and fields with the animals she loves. She is somewhat feral, in fact, and that is one of the charms of this spellbinding novel, first published in 1979. While modern life has changed radically since then, perhaps especially for women, Belben is still walloping readers with visceral vignettes. The novel arranges facets of Lavinia’s life and mind through six thematic sections: on sex and celibacy, Robin Hood (yes, from the 14th century), childhood, travel, loneliness (“In every patch a papa, a mama, and their heart-shaped-faced children, a family circle, complete, into which I intrude….I am a moth”), and the end of life for various creatures, including a beloved dog. Belben sketches scenes with a calligraphy brush and quick washes of color. Her renegade heroine recalls a solo traveler from Jean Rhys or Renata Adler, guzzling the world in elegant decrepitude. An imaginary daughter named Jessie sometimes accompanies her. Her parents haunt her, too, but the lost people she dwells on include versions of herself. Every creature and object is charged and embodied: “The dwellings had their eyelids down.” She sees herself in everything and everyone, living in layers of history and literature. Accordingly, Belben’s language is exciting, mined from biblical and Shakespearean cadences: “I am aware of isolated parts of my body which have no feeling; they feel and feel not; such as the hair on my skin.” She is unafraid of gore and puns. As singular as Belben is, she shares a juicy terrain with lusty intellects (Harold Brodkey, Jeannette Winterson); tender, rooted poets (D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas); rhapsodic magpies (Gertrude Stein, James Joyce); fantastical artists (Hieronymus Bosch); and playfully morbid filmmakers (Yorgos Lanthimos, Daina Oniunas-Pusić). Belben collages a primal, dreamlike landscape that is a thrilling privilege to visit. This is social history, too, a takedown of the “old maid” as cautionary tale. It is remarkable how much younger 36 seems now than in Belben’s telling, and what Lavinia calls “the glow of celibacy” is all the rage. Readers who delight in women’s radical fantasies will also be rewarded by the wicked visions from a time when finding erotic freedom with a self-celebrated female body was revolutionary.
The novel fires on all senses with an earthy, frank heroine who’s riveting to know and impossible to forget.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781916751316
Page Count: 144
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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.
