This makes seven of Ann Patchett’s books I’ve read (including the beloved pre-blog Bel Canto), but the first I’ve listened to her read. Her voice had become very familiar to me as she often appears in my Facebook feed in her bookstore talking about books she loves. Hearing her read this novel was like having an ice cold drink in this heat or snuggling under a warm blanket on a cold day.
While Daphne Fuller and her husband were in the Met one day, Jonathan noticed an older man focusing on Daphne and following them. It turned out he was Eddie Triplett who had been her stepfather for a few years. Daphne and her sister Leda had loved Eddie, but were young enough when he and her mother divorced that they did not know why he disappeared from their lives. In the course of this book we get to know all the principle characters and what happened at key events.
As I’ve come to expect in an Ann Patchett book, all the characters are pretty wonderful, and even the less appealing ones are not so bad. Eddie Triplett was beloved by all and even Daphne’s mother who divorced him without explanation, warms up to him after Daphne reconnects with him. There’s Buddy, father of Daphne and Leda, who left because he couldn’t live far away from the sea and his lobstering work. Daphne remained close enough to him so that she had taken him to his cancer treatments. A less appealing character was their mother’s third husband, the author of an enormously successful book on positive thinking. Now that his genre is no longer successful, he’s become depressed and depressing to be around.
These characters are working on uncovering the past. While Daphne and Leda are focused on becoming reacquainted with Eddie, Jonathan and his sister are out of town working to clean out their mother’s house. They are overwhelmed by the amount of materials that she had saved about her own and their lives.
While the reason Daphne’s mother abruptly ended the marriage to Eddie comes to light early in this book, it is not until the end that Daphne and Eddie fully recovered the events of the dreadful night of a frightful accident the two were in. I will leave the reason for the name of the book and the picture of the horse on the cover for readers to learn by reading it.
Do I need to say that it sure was a pleasure to read this book?
Ann Patchett, Whistler, Harper, 2026, 295 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.