An intriguing but dense philosophical tale with supernatural elements.
A Japanese teenager in Texas discovers a strange connection to a missing person case in this philosophical novel.
When Japanese exchange student Hanabusa Saichi lands in Texas, he feels every inch a foreigner. Despite his severe anxiety, he’s decided to come to America for his freshman year of high school in hopes that the change of environment will help him break out of his shell. His new temporary home is the city of McKinney, Texas, and the Greenes are his host family: police officer Richard and his wife, Sandra; daughter, Kate; and son, Eric. The suburban charm of McKinney belies the ominous shadow looming over the city: four recent disappearances that the police believe could be the work of a kidnapper. Saichi becomes particularly interested in the case when, during one of his long walks, he discovers a hidden glen of flowers in the nearby forest. The glen not only feels like home in a way that no other place ever has before, but among the flowers Saichi also receives visions—including one regarding the fate of one of the missing people: Lauren Winters. As Saichi grows closer to the Greene children, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the case. Were these kidnappings, murders, or even suicides? When Eric disappears, solving the mystery becomes Saichi’s single concern. He wants to find Eric and protect Kate: “The answer presented itself boldly for him to make into his reason for being; he thought, if I can save Kate and Eric, then I’ll be able to save everyone else, including myself. Every mistake made before could be undone if he could triumph over the darkness of the world here.” Can the secret of the disappearances lead Saichi to the greatest mystery of all: understanding why he’s always felt out of place in the world?
Jordan’s prose is categorized by long, ornate passages deftly describing both the physical setting and Saichi’s psychological state: “Standing there just past the willow leaves he’d parted, Saichi hesitated to step in any further for fear of trampling on any individual member of the beautiful world he’d stumbled upon; to leave his mark in this negative manner would surely tarnish his heart forevermore.” While the premise is a captivating one, the novel turns out to be not a mystery so much as a ruminative exploration of Saichi’s conflicted psyche. The story crawls along at a pace that seems almost engineered to frustrate readers. (The first half-dozen pages are devoted to the last few minutes of Saichi’s flight from Los Angeles to Dallas, during which almost no information about him is given, but three separate announcements by the pilot are included in full.) For all the psychology, there is little recognizable humanity to be found: Even within the claustrophobic Greene household, Saichi feels like a brain floating by itself in a void. The other characters are flat and ghostly. The book is over 300 pages and manages to somehow feel twice that length. In forsaking accessible characters or a compelling story, the author leaves readers few reasons to stick it out to the end.
An intriguing but dense philosophical tale with supernatural elements.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-58-836220-7
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2021
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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