A moving family tale with a strong cast that readers will love.
An indomitable man guides his Jewish family through the horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe in this debut novel.
Readers meet Elazar Gershovich in 1922. But the backstory is that, in 1903, the Gershoviches were living a comfortable life in Kishinev, Moldova, when the Christians attacked the Jews in a pogrom. Little Elazar was thrown from a window, his brother Hershel had his leg broken, their mother was gang-raped, and two siblings were murdered. The family fled north to Kalarash, Moldova, and started over. Now, Elazar is an accomplished violinist in his musical family (Papa loves the accordion, Mama prefers the clarinet, and Hershel plays percussion). Yet the protagonist longs to test his wings. But first, what he really wants is a girlfriend. He becomes smitten with Ita Kaplan, a winsome young artist from a wealthy family. Unfortunately, she plans to join her three sisters in Paris, and France is too daunting for Elazar. Then there is Mariam Gabashvili, but, since she’s not Jewish, Papa forbids the match. Soon, plans change for Ita (because of the political landscape), and so she marries Elazar and they have two children, Rivka and Ira. When the war comes, Elazar and his family and Hershel and his wife—their two sons are conscripted by the Russians—flee east ahead of the German bombardment. After a monumental trek—on foot, by train, and by boat—they end up in Uzbekistan for the duration of the war. Lice are a constant scourge, and these pests are probably responsible for a family member contracting typhus. At war’s end, Elazar and his clan make their way back to Moldova and the bombed-out ruins. But will the treasure that Elazar buried in the backyard in Kalarash and the violin he hid in the cellar still be there? Will there be music as these irrepressible survivors try to rebuild their lives?
Turner and Gorbaty’s engaging debut novel is promising and timely, considering what is going on in the main protagonist’s part of the world. Elazar, the narrator, carries the story and will win readers over right from the start. There is subtle humor in his desperate search for his dream girl, equal parts idealism and lust. And Ita is a surprise. Readers will expect that coming from an affluent family, she would not be able to handle adversity. But when the world comes crashing down, she is by no means a quitter. She is in fact a resourceful mother and loving wife through thick and thin (mostly thin). And Elazar is forever the optimist because positivity costs nothing, and pessimism is pointless, at least in his eyes. A scene involving the family member fighting typhus is beautiful and poignant (Dickens would approve). Of course, in war everyone suffers, and one would hope that the misery would bring common understanding and forbearance. But not in Moldova. In the Kalarash shtetl, a simple code evolves. In a precarious universe, you live every day as if it’s your last, so “one: have some fun, two: try to do some good, and three: don’t screw anyone over too badly.” Surely, there are more exalted codes of conduct, but these people are not given to moral preening.
A moving family tale with a strong cast that readers will love.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9798218267544
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Bessarabian Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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