With its luminous depiction of all that has been lost and what remains at risk, there is no better book to read right now.
A gorgeously immersive story of childhood cut short by war.
“My brother, Yuri, swimming in the River Desna”: As Wachman’s breathtaking debut opens, Artem Vovchenko draws the first picture in a sketchbook his father has sent him from the United States for his 12th birthday. It will be followed by other images of a sweet childhood in the small town of Chernihiv, Ukraine—going to school for the first time, riding bikes and taking dares, watching horror movies at a sleepover, visiting their grandfather’s farm in the countryside, where the boys try to earn money for a Nintendo Switch by collecting sunflower seeds. For a while, Artem’s most troubling problem is wondering whether his best friend, Viktor, shares his more-than-friendly feelings—sometimes, it seems he might! But on Feb. 24, 2022, the boys’ world is shattered by the arrival of Russian soldiers, and before long Artem and Yuri are on their own, fighting to survive in the devastated hellscape that used to be their home. About as amazing and impressive as you can imagine, this 25-year-old debut author from Massachusetts has evoked the details of life in Ukraine with utterly convincing clarity, and his depiction of the specific brutality of war will bring you to tears. The key to this achievement is the crystal-clear voice of Artem, a big brother lingering at the far edge of childhood, worshipping his mama and grandpa, bitterly missing his father, learning his country’s history, riding the roller coaster of his crush—then pitched abruptly into a jagged world of violence, grief, shame, responsibility, and hate. He is a narrator to fall in love with, evoking connections to the work of Anthony Marra, Justin Torres, and J.D. Salinger. The structure of the book, unfolding via 100 scenes from Artem’s sketchbook, underlines the essential role of art and storytelling as survival skills for life’s most ordinary and extraordinary challenges. As an epigraph suggests, “War cannot be understood; it must be felt.” Wachman does the essential work of making us feel.
With its luminous depiction of all that has been lost and what remains at risk, there is no better book to read right now.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063418226
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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