An entertaining, if somewhat lightweight, coming-of-age adventure.
Four teenage Texans find themselves stranded on a forbidding, inaccessible island in this novel.
William Flynn and his friends Brian Johnson, Randy Moss, and Miguel Gonzalez are subject to repeated bouts of bullying from the local Thousand Oaks Gang. One day, a school security guard intervenes when the gang attacks, and the bullies flee, leaving behind a rucksack containing a large quantity of money and marijuana. William hides the bag at his house, and when the gang comes looking for it, he doesn’t answer their questions, which inevitably leads to further violent encounters. On a camping trip, the boys meet Tony and Victoria, two 18-year-olds who work on the lake, and they strike up a friendship with them. The boys later spend a weekend at the lakeside in an old abandoned mansion that William calls the Cabin of Seclusion;when members of the Thousand Oaks Gang arrive, however, the kids are forced to flee by boat, which, due to poor navigation, finds them stranded on an island surrounded by jagged rocks. A possibly poisonous snake bites Randy, Brian can’t swim, and without shelter or an obvious source of food, all of the boys find themselves in a very bad situation. In an afterword, Semegran makes no secret of his admiration for William Golding’s classic 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies and Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body, on which the popular 1986 film Stand by Me was based. It shows in his own work, as he puts the dynamics of adolescent friendships at the heart of his story, although the narrative doesn’t really carry the same weight as Golding’s. The group dynamic doesn’t shift significantly on the island, either; there are no power struggles, divisive politics, or moral dilemmas, which saps some of the narrative’s power. The novel’s pacing is somewhat inconsistent, as well, with a long buildup to the island scenes and a relatively lengthy where-are-they-now coda. Overall, though, this is an absorbing, nostalgic, and polished story that will likely find its readership.
An entertaining, if somewhat lightweight, coming-of-age adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-08-785685-8
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Mutt Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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