A lurid exploration of passion, agency, and the role of art in self-actualization.
In D’Stair’s novel, a listless mother finds an object of obsession while on a guided tour of Italy.
Middle-aged Helen Bonaparte is quietly starving, but she can’t articulate what will sate her. She arrives in Venice while on a weeklong guided tour of Italy’s great cities and artistic history under no romantic illusions about where she is or who she’s with—she finds Venice “grey” and “unfortunate,” while her fellow Americans “inspire loathing.” Providing welcome distraction amid her vapid company and the ostentatious design of the city is Marieke, the tour guide, who’s young and beautiful and Dutch. Helen’s fascination is immediate: “My body is pierced with Marieke.” From the first dinner they share in Venice, Helen’s hyper-fixation intensifies, and her engagement with her fellow travelers and the cities they traverse (not to mention her relationship with her partner, Marcel, and their two children) begins to pale in the face of this new erotic fixation. She has enough self-awareness to shield her darker compulsions—Helen is careful not to look at or speak with Marieke for too long, and she befriends a fellow tour mate, Richard, to obscure her singular focus and desire. But as the group visits more cities, monuments, and museums (nearly every chapter denotes a new city and day), she becomes emboldened (inching toward frantic) as she reads into every touch and gloats over the symbolism in gestures as simple as sipping from a coffee cup. Is this erotic spell mutual, or is Helen losing herself to fantasy?
Before Helen departed for Italy, Marcel had recommended she take the novel Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith (author of queer, psychological novels such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt) for company. Marcel’s reasoning is that the novel’s story takes place in the same towns; this can be read as a meta “wink” at D’Stair drawing inspiration from Highsmith’s interrogations of identity and existential crises amid picturesque backdrops. The novel Helen brings along involves a murder, and readers will find echoes of Ripley’s title character’s obsession with a beautiful young man and the escapist potential of his lifestyle in how Helen pines for Marieke and in the story’s mounting potential for violence. Helen notes again and again how little she cares for any of her tour mates, not even bothering to learn their names (aside from Richard’s). Her deepest conversations and moments of introspection that aren’t filtered through the lens of Marieke come from experiencing the art around her. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, for example, offers a reprieve from her general cynicism, allowing her to ruminate and perhaps even believe in the power of art’s influence, if only briefly: “What does it matter whether it is truly real or some burgeoning capitalist’s abomination. Only the romance matters now, the symbol, the truth not in the material but in the mind of the observer.” And this elusive romance, for better or worse, eventually drives Helen toward her conclusion.
A lurid exploration of passion, agency, and the role of art in self-actualization.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781088017807
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Late Marriage Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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