An insightful look at a forgotten conflict.
Two women are caught up in the Russian-Chechen clash of the 1990s and 2000s.
This debut novel, based on historical events, is the story of two women: Alla, half-Chechen and half-Russian, and Nadezhda, a Moscow native. They become close friends as children, drift apart, reconnect as adults, and end up on opposite sides when Chechen rebels take hostages in a Russian theater in 2002. Alla receives a letter from Nadezhda shortly before her father, husband, and son are killed in a Russian airstrike, and she decides to move to Moscow and live with her old friend. Before she leaves Chechnya, Alla trains as a guerrilla fighter and commits to working with the rebels in the future. In Moscow, Nadezhda enjoys her job at an international school, but even though she was fired by the FSB after getting involved with an Englishman, her former spymasters stay in touch and continue to press her for information on her foreign friends and Alla. Over the course of several years, the two women make the most of life in an evolving Russia, with Alla working to support Chechen refugees in Moscow and Nadezhda developing a relationship with a Canadian American academic, an “unassuming but attractive foreigner.” Nadezhda and her boyfriend are enjoying an evening at the theater when Alla’s group takes the entire audience hostage, and the dramatic events bring major changes to both their lives. Goodings has clearly done substantial research, both on the Chechen conflict and on the atmosphere of Russia during the time period. The book brings its setting to life with vivid descriptions, and cameo appearances by Vladimir Putin and Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya add authenticity. Although the narrative’s pace can be a bit slow at times, the author does a solid job of balancing the many threads of a complex plot and illuminating the motivations of all the characters, showing how war affects even those who try not to participate in it. With its focus on a little-discussed area of recent history, the story is likely to appeal to historical fiction fans looking for something other than a World War II novel.
An insightful look at a forgotten conflict.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1039153936
Page Count: 228
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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