Everything this great American author’s fans are looking for.
The long second act of a New England writer’s life, rich in family, laced with troubles personal and public.
Maynard’s 18th book is a stirring, satisfying sequel to Count the Ways (2021), continuing the story of New England children’s book author Eleanor through the years 2010 to 2024, including the Trump election, Covid-19, the Jan. 6 insurrection, school shootings, and lots and lots of great American music playing in the background. The book’s title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, and John Prine, who died of Covid in 2020, presides over the story. As the author puts it in a note, “I never met him, but in these pages, I honor his musical legacy of humor, wisdom, passion, and tenderness.” As in all Maynard’s best work, those qualities are in evidence throughout. A prologue recaps an event central to the first book—an accident that resulted in a brain injury to Eleanor’s youngest child, in the wake of which Eleanor’s marriage to Cam slowly but surely crumbled. In Part 1, called The Death of Cam, the babysitter he left her for is history, and when Cam falls ill, none of their other children is available to care for him and their brain-damaged brother, so Eleanor moves back from Brookline to the family farm to do the job. Oldest child Al lives on the West Coast and is now fully transitioned, married to a woman, enjoying career success, and hoping to adopt. Middle child Ursula is a mother of three, lives in Vermont, and is married to a high school friend named Jake who morphs into a scary Proud Boy–type in the Trump years. Ursula is deeply estranged from her mother and treats her cruelly; one of the numerous plot threads traces the evolution of this painful situation. Others follow Eleanor’s jet-setting romance with a famous climate change warrior; various projects to commercialize and Hollywood-ize her books; a sexual abuse scandal; and most centrally, this question: “A good mother. Who even knows what that is?” This ample narrative is arranged into tasty vignettes with appealing, sometimes funny subtitles, making it a pleasure to digest.
Everything this great American author’s fans are looking for.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780062398307
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
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