A slim, sharply pointed knife of a novel.
A recently widowed Italian farm wife spends a long night on the phone with her local veterinarian.
With its dependence on dialogue and rising tension as revelations about the characters’ pasts build toward a present-moment crisis, Naspini's short novel feels like a two-character play. The usually resilient 66-year-old Nives falls into despair when her husband of many years dies unexpectedly. Rebuffing a suggestion to leave the farm and move in with her daughter’s family in France, Nives suffers debilitating loneliness until she brings Giacomina, a chicken, into the house for company. Then Giacomina becomes paralyzed, and panicky Nives calls old acquaintance Loriano Bottai for veterinary advice. Once Bottai’s wife, Donatella, rouses the alcoholic vet and goes to bed, Nives and Bottai settle in to what becomes a verbal marathon. Their argument about the chicken’s condition leads to banter about Donatella’s snoring, so loud Nives can hear it over the phone. When Bottai mentions that his upstairs neighbor, Pagliuchi, hears Donatella too, the banter becomes gossip about Pagliuchi’s long-ago youthful affair with Rosa, a girl who threw herself from the church belfry. Nives ponders what it must be like for Pagliuchi, “living with death on [his] conscience,” but reveals that she, as well as Donatella, had problematic relationships as an adolescent with both Pagliuchi and Rosa. While Nives talks in concrete terms about Rosa’s ghost cursing them, Bottai sees Rosa as a metaphor for “that thing we all have, which sometimes keeps us awake at night"—a night Bottai and Nives are sharing as they bring up one “Rosa” after another whom they hurt or were hurt by. The two are by turns friendly and hostile, with each revelation shifting who dominates the conversation. Then, midway through, Nives declares that part of her was “massacred” more than 30 years ago, and it becomes clear that Nives and Bottai are each other’s main “Rosas,” cursed with love, resentment, vengeance, cowardice, and guilt.
A slim, sharply pointed knife of a novel.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60945-666-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
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