While Quindlen may lean too hard on the hope motif at the end, this is an emotionally satisfying, absorbing story.
When the title character dies suddenly of an aneurysm, her husband, four children and best friend must deal with their grief and find a path forward.
Annie Fonzheimer grew up in small-town Greengrass, Pennsylvania, and never left. She married “too fast and too young” when she got pregnant by local boy Bill Brown, a plumber by trade. Annie works long hours as an aide at a nursing home and tends to her four children, ages 6 to 13, in a small house that belongs to her mother-in-law, the prickly Dora. But Annie, high-spirited and much adored, is content with her “lovely reliable” life, even if it’s not exactly what she’d expected. She’s a vibrant presence in this novel, despite getting bumped off in the first sentence. Quindlen weaves Annie’s backstory with an account of her survivors, who suffer mightily in her absence. Without her mother, eldest child Ali watches over her younger siblings and navigates a friendship with a girl who harbors a disturbing secret. Best pal Annemarie, whom Annie helped save from drug addition, must decide if she can persevere without her friend’s steadying hand. And Bill, who wasn’t sure about marrying Annie at first—and then found he couldn’t imagine life without her—must sort out his feelings for a woman he was involved with before his wife. Quindlen, whose own mother died when she was 19, is good at this sort of domestic drama, elevating material that might seem over-familiar, even maudlin in other hands; the well-drawn characters and sharp observations keep the reader engaged. “Maybe grief was like homesickness,” Bill muses at one point, “something that wasn’t just about a specific person, but about losing that feeling that you were where you belonged….” Actually, not a lot happens until the novel’s final section, in which, arguably, too much happens.
While Quindlen may lean too hard on the hope motif at the end, this is an emotionally satisfying, absorbing story.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593229804
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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
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