For all the eons it may take to read it, this colossus of a book will own you.
A great American novel of people and passions and ideas—and, of course, dogs.
For the many fans of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (2008), this ambitious and captivating prequel focuses on that character’s grandfather, John Sawtelle. Its nearly 1,000 pages begin in 1919 when John, who has been working as a road-tester at a car factory, finds a perfect piece of land when his jalopy breaks down in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, where he surprises his dog, Gus, by walking 63 yards on his hands. John won’t take possession of this inspiring tract for another 300-some pages, necessary to introduce the key characters and elements Wroblewski has invented to populate his cabinet of wonders. Characters include a giant carpenter named Elbow; a World War I amputee named Frank Eckling; John’s brilliant and sensitive soulmate, Mary; a logger named So Jack Von Osten and his huge horse, Granddaddy, who can both count and give romantic counseling. Elements: none more important than a fictional 1897 volume called Practical Agriculture and Free Will by George Solomon Drencher, the source of John’s conviction that life’s purpose is to “Seek, seek, seek—the Singularism!” John’s singularism is of course encapsulated in the breed of dog he and Mary will eventually develop, the Sawtelle dog; you’ll wait another few hundred pages for that to emerge, but the delights along the way are manifold. Like this comparison of whiskey and brandy: “Whiskey tasted like something squeezed out of an oak plank, like mentholated gasoline. Brandy was composed of equal parts sunlight and lava. Where whiskey came home looking for an argument, brandy noticed how truly simpatico you were.” One of the darker parts of the book focuses on a terrible incident involving John and Mary’s sons, setting the stage for events readers of Edgar will recall with a chill. A hilarious and moving section toward the end—by now it’s the late 1950s—follows John’s attempts to write a book called Familiaris, in which the author may or may not reveal secrets of his craft. Already having drawn comparisons to Russo, Irving, Strout, McCarthy, and Gilbert, with García Márquez added here, Wroblewski earns them all, amply rewarding readers who have been waiting impatiently for 15 years.
For all the eons it may take to read it, this colossus of a book will own you.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798212194297
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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