A delightful novel filled with warmth, music, and an obvious love of Bach.
A young boy sings for Johann Sebastian Bach in this richly textured tale of music and life.
After Bach’s death in 1750, organ-maker Stefan Silbermann recalls a part of his boyhood in 1723, when his widowed father sends him to Leipzig to try out for a boys’ choir under Bach, then a church cantor. Bach’s goal is to set to music passages from the Bible, specifically the Passion according to Saint Matthew, for Good Friday. He accepts the carrot-haired Stefan, who has a beautiful voice that causes jealousy and prompts bullying from the other boys. Early on, Stefan learns that the boys must do their homework or their teacher (not Bach) will “smite” them with a cane. He runs away but returns and spends time in the school’s prison for another’s offense. Then Bach invites him to live for a while with his family in a home filled with musical instruments and people, “a place without privacy and a world without secrets.” Meanwhile, Stefan finds favor with Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, and Catharina, his oldest child. Anna Magdalena has a wonderful singing voice and blue eyes that remind him of flowers. As a woman, she is not permitted to sing in church. Stefan and Catharina have a sweet friendship as they chase butterflies together and he begins to love her, but she only likes him back. Though demanding, Bach is a kind and deeply religious man. “Without charity we are nothing,” he tells Stefan, “no more than a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal....We are all orphans before the Lord.” Yet the great man has a sense of humor. “You know that Luther wrote ‘Ein fest Burg’ when he was sitting on the privy?” “No.” “A musical prayer written mid-crap. You can’t be proud when imagination strikes.” The story is rich in its descriptions of music, devotion to God, and the daily hardships of 18th-century life. And finally, this is perhaps the author’s best description: A man’s face “had a tinge of waxen yellow to it, as if an embalmer had started work but left off for his lunch.”
A delightful novel filled with warmth, music, and an obvious love of Bach.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-067-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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