Grief sharpens old conflicts among a cancer victim’s survivors in this poignant novel.
Life—the worst and best of it—goes on after a shocking death in this moving novel.
The story of a family coping with the death of a beloved middle-aged man could easily tip into mawkishness, but this assured first novel avoids that with a crisp pace, complex characters, and an unflinching depiction of how grief can blindside us. Rich is a schoolteacher who lives in rural Devon with his wife, Ruth, and their 10-year-old son, Ollie. Ruth’s irascible mother, Angran (toddler Ollie’s mashup of Angela and Grandma), and sister, Nessa, live nearby, which is a mixed blessing. When Rich is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, his impulse is to grab every bit of joy he has left and to let people know how much he loves them. Rich might face death bravely, but his family falls apart, all their long-simmering conflicts welling up like the bad drains in Angran’s decrepit cottage. Kline structures the book with short chapters that rotate among the points of view of Ruth, Nessa, Angran, Ollie, and Rich’s parents, Gerald and Marjorie. Ruth and Angran both struggle with depression; Ruth was more dependent on Rich than she realized, and Angran is deeply bitter still that she raised her daughters alone. Nessa is a take-charge schoolteacher whose close friendship with Rich long preceded his marriage to Ruth, and her battles with her mother and sister stretch back decades. Tenderhearted Marjorie is grappling not only with the loss of her son, but with her domineering husband’s descent into dementia. And Ollie, the center of the book and the only character whose chapters are written in the first person, is on the autism spectrum; his father was the main source of the stability he so deeply needs, and after Rich's death he’s both adrift and unable to express it except through his obsession with a list of gifts his father left to be distributed to his survivors. Kline captures the difficulty of navigating grief in its myriad forms, she finds mordant humor as well as tenderness in its domain, and she doesn’t shy from showing how it can bring out the worst in us as well as the best.
Grief sharpens old conflicts among a cancer victim’s survivors in this poignant novel.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984854-90-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
