Poignant and engaging, with strong female characters.
A mother and daughter are ripped apart in Burns’ novel of family strife.
It’s 1924 in New York City when Ruby Farrar del Palacio gives birth to her sixth child, a beautiful little girl—but the baby, who will be named Faith, dies during delivery. When Ruby’s Colombia-born husband, Juan, finally arrives at the hospital, Ruby narrates, “His face revealed not even a hint of kindness. Or sadness.” His indifference sets the stage for the sad narrative. Ruby decides that Faith will be her last child, but a year later she has another daughter, named Alice. Ruby and Juan, whose families are prominent in Brooklyn society, are locked in a loveless marriage. By 1930, Ruby knows she can no longer live with her dismissive, authoritarian husband, nor abide her judgmental mother-in-law, who regularly descends upon the del Palacio household to manage it as she sees fit. Confident in her decision—their large Brooklyn home is in her name, a wedding present from her parents—she tells Juan she’s filing for separation.He smirks, predicting she’ll wind up on a bread line; Ruby has no idea of the cruel lengths to which Juan will go to exact his revenge. Alternating chapters follow the stories of Ruby and Alice, a mother and daughter separated from one another for almost half a century. Ruby narrates her own tale in a voice filled with pain and melancholy, but also sharp wit. Once Alice’s story begins to dominate the novel, significant portions of Ruby’s life remain a mystery for lengthy passages of time. Alice’s life, affected by the longing and anger that set in when she was a young child denied the comfort of her mother, unspools through third-person narration, which is compelling but emotionally less dramatic than Ruby’s. Burns is a skillful wordsmith who vividly captures the details of the social milieu and extraordinary legal misogyny of the period. Despite an accumulation of tragedies that stray across the line into melodrama, Burns has delivered an addictive read.
Poignant and engaging, with strong female characters.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798891321380
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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