Strong on atmosphere but light on plot, as if the story itself were paralyzed by the heat wave it so effectively depicts.
A promising young filmmaker visits the summer home of a famous director and her daughter.
Shortly after taking a workshop with her idol, Ellen, in London, Ruby is delighted by an invitation to come out to the director’s place in the English countryside. Having had her first short film screened at Sundance, Ruby is now working on a script for a feature, and the opportunity to get Ellen’s help as she puts the final touches on it seems a dream come true. But the visit turns out to be a different sort of dream, dominated not by creative mentorship but by intense and confusing relationships with Ellen and her 20-year-old daughter, Lara, and by a brutal July heat wave that makes even eating a meal a challenging project. Though Ellen’s home apparently has no air conditioning, it does have a swimming pool, and as Ellen is slow to offer any plan for working together and Lara is procrastinating her college applications, the two younger women spend much of their time in bikinis. “She looked at me, her hair lit up gold by the sun, the freckles on her nose. She said, what would you do if I kissed you? and before I’d even really processed that, yes, that’s what she’d said, she’d done it.” As things heat up between Lara and Ruby, Ellen announces she has to go to London. Suddenly responsible for Ellen’s chickens, her greenhouse, her house, her grounds, and her trouble-child daughter, and not yet having received any help with her script, Ruby finds she is far from up to the task, as well as quite angry. In her sophomore novel, Crimp returns to the theme of women in the arts, and her hypnotic first-person narration runs together with the dialogue, using no quotation marks. But Ruby’s shaky self-esteem and passivity about getting what she needs from this situation eventually becomes frustrating for the reader, and the slightly creepy, claustrophobic mood is like a gathering storm that never breaks. The question of whether Ellen actually intended to help Ruby or had something more exploitative in mind is never clearly answered.
Strong on atmosphere but light on plot, as if the story itself were paralyzed by the heat wave it so effectively depicts.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250792792
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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