book reviews

Book Review: THE TRIAL OF MAGDALENA OVERMORROW by Catríona Moran

| Jessica Crawford

The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow by Catríona Moran is a 480 page novel (apparently the first in a planned duology??) published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2026.

Genre

Fantasy, Romance

Description

Perfect for readers of Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden, The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow is a sweeping enemies-to-lovers debut epic for romantasy-curious fantasy readers, fantasy-curious romantasy readers, and all lovers of slowburn romance.

Scholar. Healer. Harlot.

In her house, the villainy is her.

Magdalena Overmorrow has been called a scholar, a healer, a harlot. She carves out some measure of freedom for the women of Astoleyn, risking capture and death by caring for them and performing forbidden abortions. When she’s betrayed by a close confidante, she faces banishment to the realm’s desolate northernmost city as an accused witch. There, she must await her trial and possible doom under the watchful aegis of the Lord Proctor of Cair Gramora, a man so pious and humorless it is rumored that he has never once laughed in his life.

When she arrives, though, Magda is surprised to find that the Lord Proctor isn’t the grizzled old priest she expected but a man barely older than she is. As cold and mysterious and beautiful as the mountains at the cair’s northern border, he holds her life in his hands. One word from him could send her to the stake or worse, but she can’t help her fascination with a man and fellow scholar who is more than he appears to be, and the dangerous secrets he is clearly keeping. As her trial draws closer and the intrigue of the isolated cair threatens them both, she and the Lord Proctor must form an uneasy alliance that could either save her life or lead her to martyrdom and ruin.

Opening Line

It is the harvest season: a time of reflection and repentance, of setting one’s affairs in order before the unforgiving slog of winter, of purging one’s house of any villainy that has plagued it during the hot, slack summer.

My Thoughts

The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow is “Romantasy Plus”–the romance and occasional spicy scenes are garnish to the main dish of a fantasy story rooted in feminism.

Magda acts in her community as a sort of witchy healer and cunning woman (I think seeing this same type of character being persecuted in novels has been way overdone by this point, but the worldbuilding in this story bolsters it with enough original interesting details that it didn’t bother me here). She is an educated and sexually liberated woman who is used to people gossiping about her personal affairs with disdain. At the beginning of the book we learn that she has been accused of apostasy for helping women terminate unwanted pregnancies with her tinctures augmented with magic.

The incorruptible Lord Proctor of Gramora has agreed to take her as ward until the date of her trial. Thus Madga finds herself dragged to the far north to await her fate. There, she learns about the area’s customs and religious traditions and how they differ from those where has has long lived in the capital. She forms friendships during her “stay”, while also dealing with those who despise her on principle. Over and again it is demonstrated that 1) bodily autonomy is good, and 2) slut-shaming is bad. Amidst it all, she shares the feeling of an unexpected spark with her minder.

The story of Magda’s (potentially fatal) legal woes gets wrapped up nicely, and honestly pretty epically (never underestimate a woman scorned, be she mortal or divine!) On the other hand, other things in the story were left in various stages of “disappointing” at the end of the book. I was pretty bummed about this at first! I had seen no indication that this wasn’t a standalone novel, but an internet search had Google AI telling me that it is indeed part of a planned duology, which I was very pleased to learn.

Book Review: PLY by Hernan Diaz

| Jessica Crawford

Ply by Hernan Diaz is a 464 page standalone novel published in 2026 by Riverhead books.

Genre

Science/Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction

Description

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination

Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.

After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.

Opening Line

Even at night, the bridge throws a shadow on the river–a black lane where the otherwise shimmering waters seem to deepen.

My Thoughts

This book was okay, but nowhere near the 5 star perfection I found the author’s previous novel, Trust, to be.

The story follows an unnamed character in the distant future when civilization has pretty much collapsed. She gets by as a pincher, a dangerous role that has her stealing electricity from the power grid and selling the use of her juiced up equipment to power events such as concerts. A scientific researcher reaches out to her explaining that they have a machine that could do incredible things, if only it were provided with enough power.

I really just wasn’t feeling the first half of this book. It’s very bleak, I didn’t much care for any of the characters, and some of them I just didn’t understand (were they supposed to be satirical representations of people?) And at that point, there was no story keeping me interested (in fact, the inciting incident doesn’t actually happen until the very end of this first part of the book). But I read some reviews in which people said they had been hooked by the first half but then disappointed by the science-heavy second, and so I wondered if the opposite might be true for me.

And thankfully, that was the case! I found the second half of the story MUCH more engaging. Eventually, the cleverness behind the author’s choices (such as with changing POV at the halfway mark) become clear, which I thought was great. The last, I don’t know, 20% or so of the story is what had me flipping pages without wanting to stop. For a while I thought it might actually bump my rating all the way up to 4 stars. But then the ending didn’t leave me all that satisfied, and so 3.5 stars is my final rating.

Book Review: BETWEEN TWO FIRES by Christopher Buehlman

| Jessica Crawford

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman is a 430 page standalone novel, initially published by Ace in 2012, later self-published, and now with a deluxe edition published by Tor Nightfire.

Genre

Horror

Subgenre

Medieval Horror

Description

And Lucifer “Let us rise against Him now in all our numbers, and pull the walls of Heaven down…”

The year is 1348.

Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm―that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has become their battleground. Is it delirium or is it faith?

Now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and give him―blood-stained and wretched as he is―a chance at redemption he long thought lost.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

Opening Line

Now in these days the Lord God had turned His face from the business of men; and the angels who had remained loyal to Him said to one another, we must look after the children of Adam.

My Thoughts

“She’s holy,” he said, the words strange in his mouth. “Goddamn it,” he added, and felt better.

I started seeing this medieval horror novel all over the internet within the past year, and in this handsome edition Joe Hill writes a foreword about its unusual journey from being published in 2012 to becoming a sensation fourteen years later (“…that same pop culture churn that can obliterate a work of art can also resurrect one”).

This book is about a disgraced knight turned brigand who finds himself ushering an orphan girl across the French countryside during The Black Death.

This book is also about an epic battle between God’s angels in Heaven and the fallen ones of Hell that bedevil the world when it seems He has abandoned his post.

These two stories are actually one and the same.

This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

The setting in this book is about as bleak as it gets! The plague in the fourteenth century eradicated somewhere in the ballpark of half of the entire population of Europe. Eventually there were too many dead bodies and not enough living ones to bury them, and those who had managed to survive became increasingly desperate–this is the world Thomas and Delphine are traveling through. Add to that some devils testing the waters by coming to the world of humankind to terrorize God’s favorite creation, and you have a recipe for some pretty gnarly horror! But in the end it’s also a fairly touching story about redemption.

Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them.

I would love to check out more of this author’s work!

Spicy Opinion Alert! Book Review: THE WITCHES OF CAMBRIDGE by Alice Hoffman

| Jessica Crawford

The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman is a 416 page novel published on 2026, the first in a planned series.

Genre

Fantasy: Magical Realism

Description

The brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe known as the Lilith Society.

Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees. The Puritans blamed Eve for the sins of the world. That was when we began to meet in the name of Lilith, Adam’s first wife—banished for refusing to do as she was told. 

We Fly Together…

By the 1950s, Cambridge, Massachusetts feels far removed from the legendary witch trials that marked its early days as a colony. Ava, a bright young woman from a small town in Maine, arrives for her first year at Radcliffe College. There, she meets Lauren, her opposite in every way—the wild and brazen daughter of a wealthy and well-established Cambridge family. But the two have more in common than they think. Both are recruited by the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times. As they learn more about their legacy, Ava and Lauren form a close bond that is put to the test as they learn to navigate their new power, friendship, and love.

While Radcliffe seems like a safe haven, the shadow of McCarthyism looms large, an ever-present threat to the flourishing creative and intellectual life in Cambridge. And as girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realize the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.

Opening Line

Dear Reader,

Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees.

My Thoughts

What happened here? Did they say, “The marketing power behind your name alone is enough, you can go ahead and ignore all the rules for writing”?

This book is maybe 10% infodumping, 75% telling instead of showing, and 15% of actual scenes playing out for the reader. It spans the course of four years while the two main characters attend Radcliffe College in the 1950s, but don’t think you ever actually accompany them to a single class. They live at Lilith House, where magic is taught at Sunday meetings, but you’ll never actually see a single one of these meetings as it happens. Instead we are treated to only a list of classes they are enrolled in, are told what kind of things they learn in their witch meetings. And if the severe paucity of actually showing readers a scene as it unfolds isn’t bad enough, there is very little plot driving this story.

There is quite a bit of repetition of information, several characters appear on page and are given a name solely for the purpose of very quickly disappearing or dying or otherwise attempting to set a tense and mysterious tone. There are no rules to the magic, the author can just spew out another bit of whimsy ad hoc, making it feel fairly meaningless. These witches are polydactyl, pointy-toothed, and black-blooded–but good lord, don’t get me started on the characters who have apparently never shed blood in their lives, or the one who has never, not once, looked at her own menstrual blood.

As far as the earlier timeline with “the first witch of Cambridge”, as told through letters read by our 1950s protagonists: novels that highlight the horrors of the witch trials at the hands of Puritans and draw parallels with modern day women and/or McCarthyism are a dime a dozen these days. Many of these books are beloved, but in a publishing world now oversaturated with them, you have to make sure yours really offers something new and exciting to the effort. I’m not sure this one did quite enough of that.

A note on the audiobook: I found Mena Suvari’s voice during the narration very pleasant, but her performance of the dialogue for almost every character made them all sound absolutely insufferable, just the worst identical-sounding bunch of buttholes. I hated nearly every one of them because of this. I did find myself thinking that, had I read certain lines (not limited to just dialogue) on the page in a manner that seemed more appropriate to me, they would have hit different.

I just…I can’t wrap my head around someone who has written such well-performing novels in the past producing THIS. But it’s Goodreads ratings aren’t terrible, so I guess the witchy vibes alone were enough for some people. Just not this people.

Book Review: THE SHIP OF DEATH by Kyle Winkler

| Jessica Crawford

The Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler is a 256 page standalone novel published by Avon in 2026.

Genre

Horror

Description

The dice roll. Darkness answers.

House of Leaves meets Jumanji in this brilliantly original and twisted novel composed entirely of found documents, following an unwitting couple ensnared by a sinister tabletop role-playing game

Cole and Lorraine playtest board games for some extra cash as they save up to buy a home. But after a series of bizarre coincidences, and signing a strange NDA, the couple finds on their porch a mysterious indie developer’s tabletop role-playing game called The Ship of Death. The game relies heavily on the players’ imaginations, and takes up an ever-growing amount of space: in their kitchen, and in their minds. As its true sinister nature becomes clearer, and its forces capture more in its web, the boundary between the game and reality begins to dissolve. . . and the pair are instructed to possess a stranger’s soul.

Told entirely through game reports, emails, game forum posts, personal journals, and police reports, reading The Ship of Death feels like a dangerous dice roll. It’s a sleep-stealing, possession-inducing work of intense, intelligent found cosmic horror that announces Kyle Winkler as a spectacular voice in the genre.

My Thoughts

The description of this book sounded like it would be right up my alley.

Cole and his wife Lorraine are playtesting a new tabletop roleplaying game called The Ship of Death. The mere scope of the game has them super excited at first, but then the lines between the real world and the one in the game start to blur. The result is cosmic horror. The players meet shady characters that seem to have leapt straight out of their imagined story, and find themselves compelled to carry out horrifying actions from their roleplaying in real life. The entire story is told with a mixed media format—emails, journal entries, forum posts, etc.

So why wasn’t this a home run for me? I like weird books, but this wasn’t my kind of weird, I guess. There are so many things from the game world that have you repeating, “Huh? What does that even mean?” (e.g. The Saltation of Banal Objects, The Curation of Auguries from Flesh, Sustenance and Religio-Social Habitudes, etc). And this is intentional, it adds to the creepy factor and has the characters questioning everything. But it just didn’t hit for me.

I feel like I haven’t said much that wasn’t already in the book description, but the only other information would be unnecessarily going into too much detail of the story. 256 pages presented in mixed media format is actually a fairly short book. It’s a quick read that is mysterious, tense, and dark. As far as characters, I liked the psychic Cole consults, but it’s difficult with all of the others because even if they are essentially good people, they are no longer in control of reality and do some not very good things.

Again, all of this is a great idea in theory, but in execution left this reader a bit underwhelmed. But your mileage may vary!

Book Review: KISS SLAY REPLAY by Rachel Harrison

| Jessica Crawford

Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is a 320 page standalone novel published by Berkley in 2026.

Genre

Horror

Description

Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this wild and twisty new horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of So Thirsty and Play Nice.

It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.

Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.

Opening Line

Who knew that time could move so slowly?

My Thoughts

Gosh, Rachel Harrison’s writing just goes down so easy! I pretty much read this entire book in one sitting minus meal and bathroom breaks. And it was an absolute blast!

“…the only thing that will come from constantly looking back is an inability to move forward.”

The author manages to pack so much meaning into this story that’s dressed up in the trappings of horror. Willa is having a really difficult time after breaking up with her fiancé when she realized that their years-long relationship wasn’t working any more. But still she can’t help but ruminate, wondering if she made the right choice, if she was a coward, or selfish. Her friend Cass’s diagnosis is that she is in a hell of her own making, and her prescribed treatment is to watch true crime or horror movies to remind herself that “it could always be worse”.

My priorities are all wrong…My nervous system is on high alert, but it’s been this way long before today.
When everything feels life-or-death, it’s impossible to parse out the actual stakes.

Spending time with her best friends from college for a wedding should be a happy occasion, but Willa is freaked out by the fact that her ex will also be in attendance, with a plus one. She just barely makes it through the cocktail hour and the ceremony and exchange of vows, but before the reception can get started, the murders begin.

Things could always be worse!

And then they are. When Willa wakes up again that same morning and the day of the wedding plays out again, she realizes she is stuck in a grisly and horrifying time loop. What might break her out of the cycle of terror? Changing her patterns of behavior, practicing self-reflection, examining her life’s choices? Can she confront her problems head-on and steel herself to face an unknown future? Is it a matter of accepting that life is imperfect and messy and sad and lonely sometimes, and that’s okay? Or is all of that overthinking something much more straightforward (er, well, maybe more loopy than straight or forward)?

I fell in love and surrendered to its current, and it took me someplace else, and I opened my eyes one day not knowing where I was or who I was or how I got there. And it terrified me. It still terrifies me. Am I doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior? Delude myself into thinking that love will save me, only to end up right back where I am now, staring into a void, waiting for it to say my name?

I appreciated the characters in this one, as well as the messages about life, love, and happiness. Looking at these through a horror lens made for a very entertaining romp. Harrison is a master at what she does!

Lastly, an example of the amusing interactions that occur amongst the friend group at the wedding before the carnage gets started, providing a bit of levity:

“Why does your foot look like tie-dye?”
My right foot is just a massive bruise from when I dropped my suitcase on it. I popped three Advil and it’s still killing me.
“Ugh!” I sit on the bed, kick my foot up. “Is it super noticeable?”
He shrugs. “No one will be looking at your feet. They’ll be looking at your face. Or your, you know. Assets.”
I laugh. “Thanks, Ev.”
“There could be some people looking at your feet, but you don’t need to concern yourself with those people. Unless you’re interested in a very niche income stream moving forward. Which, no judgment.”

Book Review: UNDER STORY by Chloe Benjamin

| Jessica Crawford

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin is a 512 page standalone novel published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2026.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction

Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story—and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin’s place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.

“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”

At the end of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career, a husband, and a family.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.

Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world, they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?

A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.

Opening Line

Laurel’s first memories of soil–though at the time, she would have called it dirt–came from weeding in her mother’s garden.

My Thoughts

She must remind herself that words like beginning and end, one and two, are a matter of perspective. A line implies before and after; a circle says, And then, and then…

Laurel is a mycologist who leaves her university professorship to wash dishes at a research station in Antarctica after a tragedy leads to the dissolution of her marriage. The isolation and stark beauty of the location suits her, and she makes some good friends. Then a color-changing Arc appears over the icy expanse. Her ex-husband Eli is one of the physicists sent to study the unexplained phenomenon, and the two of them eventually realize the Arc might in fact represent the second chances in life that they had been hoping for.

This reflective and emotional book uses speculative science fiction as a tool to closely examine life, love, and grief. The author incorporated things that have caught her fancy throughout her life as building blocks to craft this moving tale: namely the interconnectedness of all lifeforms (highlighted most particularly here with the relationship between trees and fungi), and results from research performed in Antarctica linked to a theory of a mirror universe. If such a thing were to exist, what kind of opportunities might it present?

Maybe catastrophizing is like freezing a photon in flight: if you fixate on one outcome, all of the others collapse. That’s what fear does, she thinks. It makes you pick a story. If the stays open, the future might hold everything at once.

The beginning of the book (Laurel going to the ends of the Earth to escape her known life with its painful truths) was very good, and the end was pretty excellent (considering topics such as what makes for a meaningful life, and what is “enough”), but the story did drag a bit for me in the middle. I also side-eyed a few details here and there. Even still, I teared up several times during its telling, which for this reader is a sign of success!

And how absurd it is, the bargain of life: that we should be gifted love while guaranteed loss, love’s tax.

This book asks the question, how far would you go to get more time with a lost loved one? I don’t think this will be an all-time favorite like Benjamin’s The Immortalists was for me, but is definitely a strong contender for one of my favorite reads of the year. (And considering these books in conjunction–wow, can this author write, but man, who did she lose?)

Major content warning here for the death of a child

Book Review: SOLACE HOUSE by Will Maclean

| Jessica Crawford

Solace House by Will Maclean is a 512 page standalone novel with a U.S. publication date of October 13, 2026.

Genre

Horror (Literary, Psychological, Occult/Supernatural)

Description

In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.

When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne’s journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and – most mysteriously – his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.

As the students delve deeper into the house’s secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne’s strange opus and its promise of another world… and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.

Opening Line

“So, what are you going to do all summer?” said Marcus idly, through half a sandwich.

My Thoughts

This book is being comped as The Secret History (Donna Tartt) meets The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson). I found that description pretty apt—except that as I read on, I decided it was a good part House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski as well.

A group of college students in the UK have a summer job cleaning out buildings their university is hoping to purchase and turn into residence halls. One is a long-defunct mental asylum, the other the Gothic-style private home of a hoarder who died years before. A compellingly spooky atmosphere is spun with details like the muffled ringing of an old-fashioned telephone sounding occasionally from somewhere in the cluttered mess, and the fact that battery-powered items unfailingly die when in the proximity of Solace House. Then you learn the former occupant was mixed up in some sort of occult business, possibly in response to the manifestations of his own madness. Eventually the story reaches even further, into the nature of reality/time/life itself. There was an interesting variety of characters and a good build up of tension as the reader feels ever more invested in puzzling out what’s really going on.

A few quibbles are that I didn’t fully understand the ending, the synopsis states the story takes place in 1993 but this fact doesn’t become evident until more than 50% in and doesn’t really seem to be at all relevant or necessary, the story of the MC’s parents also seems rather pointless, and there is quite a bit of poetry included. I realize this last one is a me problem, as a reader, but I am extremely likely to simply skip over poems and song lyrics (ahem, Tolkein) in a novel, even though in this case I could tell the poems were going to be relevant to figuring out important messages in the story. I also didn’t super love our main character (or feel much of anything for them, really), and there was at least one of the students whose involvement in the story seemed completely pointless.

Despite these things, I definitely recommend giving this one a read for the vibes and the deep philosophical thinking it encourages.

Book Review: WHISTLER by Ann Patchett

| Jessica Crawford

Whistler by Ann Patchett is a 296 page standalone novel published in June of 2026 by Harper.

Genre

Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Description

The acclaimed, prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling writer returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.

Opening Line

“Old guy,” my husband said in a low voice, his lips touching my ear. “Near the exit sign.”

My Thoughts

This is a literary novel about an adult woman reconnecting with her former stepfather. They already had a lovely relationship during his relatively brief marriage to her mother, but then they also trauma bonded just before circumstances forced them apart for the next several decades.

This is a sweet story, and I loved Eddie. I also quite liked Daphne’s sister Leda and father Buddy, but for the life of me could not understand most of the characters in this book (someone had apparently just been unfriendly, but that wasn’t how I had interpreted the scene; someone was described as witty after saying something completely mundane and unremarkable to this reader). Does the author only interact with pretentious weirdos, and so believes that’s just how everyone in the world is? Even Jonathan, who in most regards was quite lovely, was really annoying me at times – for a spell I believed the story might be heading toward a divorce for the Fullers. And don’t even get me started on Polly, Skip, or…Daphne’s mother (did we ever get her name?)

Was the story of the horse, Whistler, a metaphor for Daphne, or for Eddie, or both? I’m not sure. Regardless, I felt warm all over from the power of the positive relationships in this story. It has some great lines as well: both the profound and the humorous. I appreciated the messages about childhood, parenting, family, death, etc etc.

She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.

And a bonus point for the mention of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo!

Bookshop.org