A fresh take on how war disrupted small-town life in the first half of the 20th century.
Two sisters navigate love and loss in Scotland during both world wars, filling roles for absent men and healing from traumas those same men left behind.
The book opens in 1942, as Helen Anderson prepares breakfast for herself and her sister, Effie, before leaving for her day as a mail carrier in Glen Clova, Scotland. The post office job is one of many given to women while the area’s able-bodied men are away at war. Neither Helen nor Effie ever married, and they live in the family home, which also functions as the town’s schoolhouse. After Helen—or Nell, as she’s called—delivers mail, news of a plane crash nearby spreads through town. As Nell hurries to help the lone survivor, he hands her a photo of a woman before he's taken away. It’s not long before Nell discovers the woman in the picture, Mathilde, has arrived in Glen Clova to mourn the passing of her sweetheart, one of the crew members who died in the crash. As Nell begins to learn Mathilde’s story, the book flashes periodically back to the years between 1908 and 1917, showing how events during the first World War, including Nell’s work as an ambulance driver and Effie’s secret teen pregnancy, led inevitably to the complex family dynamics through which they are both trying to muddle in the 1940s. Gradually, the sisters discover many secrets and coincidences that help them understand who they are and what sort of lives they want to lead. Told in close third person throughout, the book alternates perspectives between Nell and Effie, also shifting briefly to their mother, Manon, and Mathilde. Full of interesting details about female ambulance drivers at Royaumont Abbey and life in rural Scotland during both world wars, the book offers an unhurried examination of the way secrets can burden their carriers over time. While this emotionally evocative novel would have benefitted from additional setting details to bring the village of Glen Clova more to life, the characters are drawn with depth and nuance. Similarly, although there are too many coincidences to feel entirely credible, the outcome is both satisfying and uplifting.
A fresh take on how war disrupted small-town life in the first half of the 20th century.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781916812437
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Saraband
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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