Brash and engaging on the sentence level but fails to create empathy for a main character who feels none herself.
A woman must navigate the demands of her sexually voracious girlfriend while staying one step ahead of her drug dealer’s terrifying enforcers, Betty and the Ladies.
Frances owes money to her dealer, Dom. She has one week to pay up or else he’ll have no choice but to call in his enforcer, Betty, who does horrifying things with a straightening iron to encourage payment. To make matters worse, Frances’ new girlfriend, Elaine, has become so demanding of her time that Frances has determined to dump her, just as soon as she can get a word in edgewise. But when Dom delivers a warning directly to Frances’ flat, she realizes that desperate times call for desperate measures. In exchange for monthly rent, Frances invites the irrepressible Elaine to move in with her, an agreement to which Elaine enthusiastically agrees. Frances is an emotionally stunted character, still grieving the breakup of her relationship with the woman she believes to be the love of her life, still suffering from her mother’s childhood abandonment, so overwhelmed by the world that she has stayed in the same dishwashing job for years because the routine brings a numbing escape from her feelings. In spite of Frances’ truculence, Elaine—who is bouncy, bubbly, raunchy, and desperately needy—is head over heels in love and sets about remaking Frances in the image of someone capable of loving her back. After only a day or so of cohabitation, Frances has had enough. She embarks on a plan to keep Elaine quiet—with the help of a sedative procured by Dom and slipped into Elaine’s cinnamon latte. When this plan goes predictably wrong, Frances is forced to confront the demons of her own past as she runs from the iron-wielding harpies of her future. The result is an eager, slightly unwieldy novel that suffers from its tendency to slip into an expository style. Frances’ reluctance to engage with her girlfriend often slides into outright cruelty, and the fun the book pokes at the expense of Elaine’s frank and overambitious sexuality mirrors that cruelty rather than diffusing or justifying it. A turn at the end seeks to ratify this dynamic, but it is too little too late to redeem “Funny Frances,” as Elaine calls her, who seems willing to let almost anything happen to the people around her if it buys her a little more time to stew on her own hurt feelings.
Brash and engaging on the sentence level but fails to create empathy for a main character who feels none herself.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32054-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
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
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