A subtle story of family, friendship, strong women, and the hopeful side of technological advancement.
An intergenerational SF saga in which a dying wealthy woman bears her responsibilities soberly with the help of an artificial intelligence.
In an alternate version of 2018, 61-year-old Samantha Rain, a self-made millionaire, is a sociable and multitalented investor. When she receives a diagnosis of incurable cancer that gives her only a few months to live, she takes solace in Sam, a highly advanced artificial intelligence for which she served as a model. Her late father, Moshe Rainewicz, who changed his name to Michael Rain, tells his story of pain and survival through a series of interviews with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which reveal a side of the man that he kept hidden from his daughter. Samantha’s own daughter, Grace, is an accomplished architect in Chicago whose firm is struggling to stay in business, due primarily to the refusal of a high-profile client to pay them for a project. In flashbacks, Grace navigates marital problems, the follies of raising teenage daughters with wayward streaks, and a time-consuming career that left her exhausted at the end of every day. In this novel, Lawrence meticulously crafts a century of personal histories and daily routines, and he develops a cast of characters who, despite their elite social statuses, are consistently sympathetic and relatable. Certain interactions, such as that between Michael and his interviewer, feel overly staged and stodgy. Overall, however, the plot billows and falls with an unforced realism that, for the most part, doesn’t get caught up in overemphatic prose or melodrama. As Samantha and technological marvel Sam converse—and as Grace interacts with the AI—readers are carried along on a breezy thought experiment tackling the insecurities and unexpected comforts to be found in the connection between human and computer. Fortunately, no heavy-handed dystopian robot uprising swoops in to set the world afire.
A subtle story of family, friendship, strong women, and the hopeful side of technological advancement.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73770-001-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Christmas Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
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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