While the setup threatens farce, the denouement demonstrates the precarity of women’s fates in a boomtown.
A strange and fascinating look at an eccentric, dysfunctional wealthy family in 1920s Detroit automotive circles.
As the American appetite for horseless carriages grew, so did the environs of Detroit, the country’s “Motor City.” In the first adult novel from Sepetys, the fractious Lennox clan runs the automobile-glass manufacturing business begun by Scottish-immigrant grandfather Cormac. Unfortunately, by 1927, the Lennoxes have devolved into a quarrelsome group: Stepmother Lilah receives odd injuries, while father Duncan drinks to excess and needs constant trips to the bathroom for “the squirts.” Sister Cecile longs to keep up with the local rich folk, while brother Graham and sister Charlotte (known as Chet) plot their father’s downfall. Meanwhile, the youngest sibling, Marjorie (Lilah’s only child), hopes to become a fashion designer and is thrilled when she’s offered an artist residency in downtown Detroit. Her three fellow artists, all women, include one who’s obsessed with painting Christmas scenes, another who builds furniture, and a playwright who can be heard typing but is never seen; they’re all given daily schedules and tasks by a man called Dock, who has an apartment in the building’s basement. Sepetys has meticulously researched her home city and its affluent suburbs and it shows, from descriptions of architecture down to the upper-class lingo affected by the younger Lennox family members. Their arch pronouncements, straight from the Cole Porter zeitgeist, unfortunately don’t mesh as well with the part of the book where Marjorie discovers the real impresario behind the residencies, or with Graham and Chet’s shady side hustle. The book’s first half has the feel of one of Jay Gatsby’s Roaring ’20s soirees, but it fizzles out as somber—and all too authentic—reality settles in on the Lennoxes. Still, Sepetys offers a new perspective on American capitalism by examining an era and a region seldom covered in historical fiction.
While the setup threatens farce, the denouement demonstrates the precarity of women’s fates in a boomtown.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798217093243
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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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