Fans of Tom Robbins, Barry Hannah, and Harry Crews should check out this dynamic, fresh life-on-the-road novel.
A dizzying and yet still earthy take on a woman’s life in two centuries featuring Izzy Gently, whose travels from New Mexico to Texas to Louisiana reveal as much about America’s flaws as her own.
“It’s like there’s just some places that, after one visit, you gotta carry bits of it with you all the way to your grave” says Izzy Gently, protagonist of Wheeler’s stunning debut novel. She’s speaking about the moon, with which she’s obsessed from her childhood in a cult in New Mexico to her later care for “the moonless”—people who can no longer see that object in the night sky. Izzy herself drifts like a satellite. The book’s first third, “A Tale of the Acid West,” finds pre-teen Izzy caught by the local sheriff during a raid on the cult, then sent to live with rancher Oliver Gently and his doctor wife, Maude, who have love to spare. Between the excitement of the 1969 moon landing and the Hollywood production of a movie called High Heaven that keeps Izzy and her pals in pocket money (they shake precious White Sands gypsum from horse droppings), it seems she might have a home. But in the book’s second section, “A Texas Picaresque,” restlessness takes Izzy first to Lubbock and years at a diner, then to Plainview and aimless but mostly benign casual sex and drug use, and on to a stint as caretaker of a hidden marijuana grove by the Neches River. The final section, “A Southern Gothic Silhouette,” finds Izzy in Louisiana, now a weary social worker at New Orleans General Hospital. Her life revolves around her partner, Eli, and her enormous, never-blooming plant, La Reina de la Noche, that she grew from a cutting. She’ll take pieces of it, or at least its otherworldly essence, all the way to her grave. There isn’t even space to mention the monkey astronauts or the menstrual cups. Izzy’s tale is strange and wild, but it’s also one that illuminates our national obsession with new highs, and new heights.
Fans of Tom Robbins, Barry Hannah, and Harry Crews should check out this dynamic, fresh life-on-the-road novel.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453575
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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