An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender,...
Frisch offers a debut novel about best friends growing up on an island near Tahiti who experience tragedies connected to local radioactivity.
Teenage friends Ari and Natua’s beautiful South Pacific homeland in French Polynesia was used as a nuclear testing site by the French government from the 1960s to the ’90s. Natua’s single mother, Angela, has serious health issues and is trying to keep the family hotel running so that it remains a viable tourist option. All their lives become more complicated when Ari is diagnosed with myeloma, which may be related to fallout from the nuclear testing years before. Her activist father, Manu, is trying to force France to declassify documents that would support his efforts to have the radioactive waste safely cleaned up. Manu runs into many political obstacles but fights on, although his greatest concern is his daughter’s health. Everyone is haunted by their pasts: Ari and Manu are both racked by grief over Ari’s brother Henri’s death in a plane accident; Natua wants to meet his biological father; and that father and Natua’s mother have secrets that will affect the futures of all the characters. Over the course of this novel, Frisch delivers a braided story of home and family that features complex and evolving but navigable relationships. The story moves through time with ease—Ari and Natua start the story as 14-year-olds and later reach young adulthood, island hopping to find medical care and the answers to family secrets. The major players, who include Angela, are lovingly and authentically realized as the narrative goes on, and Frisch integrates ideas of caretaking—watching out for one’s friends, one’s family, one’s home, and the planet in general—with serious, emotionally resonant life-and-death subject matter.
An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender, lasting effects.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 979-8987742105
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Bombus Books
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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