Fresh, funny, intelligent, and deeply satisfying.
Myers’ lively comic novel focuses on the raw passions of four women, not for men or each other—well, maybe those too—but mostly for the physical experience of archaeology, the grueling grunt work of a hot summer dig.
The dig in question takes place in Greece under the auspices of autocratic Dr. Charles Barton, from an unnamed university. Zara, Kara, Elise, and Patty arrive with different skills and expectations. Patty, a clueless undergraduate intern who knows nothing about archaeology, has become Barton’s spy and general whipping girl. Zara had a wonderful experience in Greece as an undergrad on the dig six years ago until she broke up with her grad student boyfriend, Gary, now a committed archaeologist. She’s drifted through various botched jobs and boyfriends ever since. Aware that Gary will be there, she joins this year’s dig on a desperate whim. But Gary is engaged to ambitious, high-strung perfectionist Kara, who was also on Zara’s first dig and now runs the site lab; she’s worried that her goal of a job at Sotheby’s could be derailed if she doesn’t find two missing discuses for which she’s responsible. Eccentric, independent 44-year-old Elise lacks academic credentials but is highly respected as an adept professional excavator. She and Kara blame each other for a loss suffered several years earlier, a small but valuable statue Elise found and Kara restored before it was supposedly destroyed by an earthquake. Is there a connection between the discuses and the statue? Maybe. Myers gives the angst-ridden, imperfect women entertainingly distinct voices and personalities. The men are fun too, both the appealing ones and the creeps. (And then there’s the voice of the buried.) Desires collide and relationships realign rapidly as the dig begins to go awry. Myers is adept at academic satire with a feminist bent and at unsentimental romance, but she really shines at bringing to life a working excavation: the smells, the grime, the exhaustion. And the exhilaration.
Fresh, funny, intelligent, and deeply satisfying.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304512
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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