A familiar feel-good love story dressed in modest clothing.
A 29-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman is contending with her last hope for an arranged marriage when new possibilities allow her to hope for something more.
Ten years of bad first dates haven’t stopped Penina Kalish’s matchmaker from trying. Penina herself is stalwart, cajoling herself into meeting the increasingly unimpressive bachelors in public places and attempting to find a nice Orthodox man to marry. With 22,000 Instagram followers hungry for her modest yet sexy outfits each day, a job at a jewelry store, and an offbeat sense of humor, Penina is loath to complain about her predicament. “Maybe G-d was distracted the day He assigned soulmates, and accidentally skipped me,” she thinks. Despite her beauty and kindness, Penina ranks low on the marriageability scale because of her infertility. To Penina and her community, a woman unable to bear children is “missing the most important part of [her] womanhood. Like an ornate jewelry box that’s empty inside.” For that reason, when Penina is set up with a young, handsome, penthouse-dwelling man, she knows there must be a catch, and she’s right. Still, marriage to an affluent man would solve her family’s financial woes and would also help her avoid thinking too hard about Sam Kleinfeld, her secular boss at the jewelry store, and why her heart rate mysteriously doubles when he’s nearby. Penina wonders whether the satisfaction of her family and community is worth the sacrifice of her own happiness. In the time it takes her to decide, she spends more time with Sam, revealing her vulnerabilities and puzzling over his obvious interest in her. A slow burn is to be expected, but Penina’s naïveté turns the reader’s eagerness into impatience as the dim Hanukkah-candle chemistry just keeps burning and burning and burning. Though her community is obviously of central importance to her, Penina’s unquestioning commitment to her religious lifestyle is difficult to reconcile, both with the many obstacles it presents to her happiness and with the more regressive beliefs she asserts—the largely unremarked upon pregnancy of a 14-year-old cousin is difficult to overlook.
A familiar feel-good love story dressed in modest clothing.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781639103768
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Alcove Press
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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