An atmospheric, intimate Depression-era family portrait with three distinct, engaging characters.
Whitney’s historical drama vividly captures the fears, desperation, and fortitude of a tightly knit Michigan farm family, depicted through the lives of a trio of sisters enduring the Great Depression.
Three narrators take turns recounting the events of a traumatic year on the Yoder farm. The alternating voices of very imaginative 7-year-old Nellie, narcissistic 11-year-old Irene, and superresponsible 16-year-old Flora reflect the differences in not only their ages, but in their temperaments. It is 1934, and Nellie has completed her last chore—sewing a button on her dress. She is now allowed to run off to greet the farm animals she loves and to explore the woods leading to the creek. On the way, as she fantasizes about finding buried treasure, she spots a small dirt mound. Perhaps this is where she will discover hidden jewels. She begins digging, and to her horror, she uncovers a “TINY BLUE-BLACK HAND.” Terrified, she races home. The sheriff is called and discovers a dead baby. Irene doubts the story since Nellie “gets things mixed up all the time.” But Flora organizes the girls into a club to secretly learn more about the infant’s identity and cause of death. The mystery runs through the entire novel, but it is only one of a series of disturbing incidents. Two girls from a neighboring town have disappeared; a drunk brute breaks into the Yoder food cellar; seedy preacher Brother Johnson arrives on the scene; and Nellie’s life is threatened. This gives the narrative sufficient action, but its greater strength rests with the sisters’ accounts of the simple day-to-day realities of Depression life. Ma and Pa are afraid they will not be able to pay their mortgage or taxes, and customers no longer have money to buy even eggs. And there is never enough food. “Bread, potatoes, and beans are what we eat,” says Flora, which lends special poignancy to the fact that Ma hands out bean sandwiches to the hungry young “train riders.” Unfortunately, the book contains many disparaging references to the Roma people.
An atmospheric, intimate Depression-era family portrait with three distinct, engaging characters.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70401-990-1
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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