A heartfelt, life-affirming novel tailor-made for readers who love stories of female friendship.
The spirit of a woman killed in a car crash guides her friends and family toward healing in Norman-Carbone’s novel.
When Lynn, a woman in her 30s, and her husband, Scott, set out for a weekend getaway to work on their marriage, a car crash on an icy road ends her life. Lynn’s spirit is stuck in limbo, watching her friends and family struggle in her absence. Scott builds a shrine to her in his room, and her young daughters, Emma and Olivia, begin to forget things about her. Her friends—Jules, Helene, Annie, and Riley—once an inseparable group since high school, drift apart due to secrets and resentments. Able to influence her loved ones as a spirit, Lynn encourages her friends to meet up at her family’s beach cottage on the one-year anniversary of her death to repair their bond and enable them to help Scott and the girls heal. As her friends argue and reminisce, Lynn learns things she never knew and starts to come to terms with her own life and death as her friends find closure. The story is more concerned with the relationships between Lynn and her loved ones than creative depictions of the afterlife (Lynn exists mostly in a shadowy replica of her home on Earth and can communicate with her loved ones more easily than she could in life). The emotional payoff of the story far outweighs the narrative conveniences used to make it happen. The linchpin of the novel is the women’s friend group—including the secrets that pulled them apart and the loyalty to Lynn that brings them back together (“This is what it feels like to be us, girls with a shared past. No matter the circumstances, we always make each other feel warm and cozy—just like home”). The dynamics among the women, both as a group and in separate pairs, are very well developed. The text captures the ways women feel the need to model perfection for each other and illustrates how covering up weaknesses allows them to fester. There is catharsis in the way each of the women, particularly Lynn, allows herself to be imperfect and in the healing that comes from that vulnerability.
A heartfelt, life-affirming novel tailor-made for readers who love stories of female friendship.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781958231067
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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