A moving portrait of Palestinian families caught between the pressures of the Old World and the New.
Their homeland casts a heavy shadow in this poignant novel about Baltimore’s Palestinian immigrant community.
Taken from a famous saying by legendary commander Tariq ibn Zayid (“Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy”), the title of Darraj’s novel aptly describes the situation facing her ensemble cast, which finds itself trapped between Old World expectations and the challenges of life in America. Like Zayid’s soldiers, they have no choice but to fight to understand their places in the world. Young people are frequently the heroes here—in “A Child of Air,” pregnant teen Reema Baladi braves shame to keep her baby, and in “Gyroscopes,” brilliant science student Layla Marwan challenges her high school’s choice of the stereotype-ridden Aladdin for its big drama production—while Darraj’s older characters struggle under the weight of their disillusionment. In “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at the Wedding,” strip mall owner Walid Ammar can’t hide his frustration as his cherished son marries a blue-eyed non-Arab woman who has “transformed Raed, his football-playing, lawyer son…from a pathfinder into a mule that lowers itself to the ground for its back to be loaded.” That wedding scene is masterfully choreographed in a book in which each chapter reads like a small masterpiece. In fact, as characters disappear and later reappear, the book reads less like a novel than like an interconnected series of stories reminiscent of Darraj’s A Curious Land (2016). For example, readers meet Marcus Salameh, a 30-something police detective who endures the daily traumas of his job, the impatience of his girlfriend, and the iciness of a father whose bitter disappointment with life has frozen his relationship with Marcus and his sister. The novel culminates in the brilliant “Escorting the Body,” in which Marcus honors his father’s dying wish to be buried in Palestine. Darraj deftly captures the entire experience, from Marcus’ jarring arrival in Palestine to the homespun humor of village life. When Marcus discovers a secret—that his father was actually capable of showing affection, just not to his children—he makes a startling offer that changes someone’s life and his, too.
A moving portrait of Palestinian families caught between the pressures of the Old World and the New.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063324237
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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