Light on surprises but historically evocative and helmed by independent female role models.
This third installment of a YA adventure series, set in 1890s Seattle, stars a free-spirited mountaineer and her new friend, a young woman who is struggling to overcome personal demons.
It is September 1891, and Anna Gallagher Chambers is excited about an upcoming meeting with Fay Fuller at the base camp of Mount Rainier to discuss the women’s mountaineering team they hope to form. Readers of the series opener will remember Fay as the first woman to scale the formidable mountain. But now Anna has a problem. She is pregnant and wonders whether she will be allowed to travel to the base camp. And, not incidentally, she worries about what other cherished activities society will force her to give up when she becomes a mother. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Grayson is suffering two setbacks. Levi Gallagher, Anna’s brother, has broken off their courtship—by telegram, no less. And the Grayson family physician, Dr. Glazier, is trying to discourage her from becoming a nurse. He knows she sometimes exhibits obsessive-compulsive behavior (for examples, double- and triple-checking locked doors), although she has tried to keep it hidden from everyone. With misogynistic pomposity, he points out that nursing involves unexpected situations that might unsettle her mind, suggesting that she look for a husband instead. Then he gives voice to her greatest fear: “I certainly wouldn’t want you to end up in the Washington State Hospital for the Insane at Fort Steilacoom.” But Elizabeth, despite her insecurities, has an inner strength and determination that become increasingly apparent as the story develops. The entertaining narrative can hold its own as a stand-alone, although newcomers will need some time to sort out the recurring characters and their backstories. Major underlying themes remain the same: society’s implicit and explicit denigration of women and the vicious racial prejudice directed against the Native Americans who were pushed off their land during the development of Seattle. To this, McGillen adds turn-of-the-century perceptions and misconceptions about mental disorders. An uncomplicated plotline is enhanced by an abundance of historical tidbits and vivid descriptions of period fashion, lifestyles, and mores.
Light on surprises but historically evocative and helmed by independent female role models.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73342-396-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: The Evergreen Bookshelf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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