The minutia of daily life, transformed into affecting narratives.
Bennett’s collection of short stories centers flawed, vulnerable characters as they navigate loss, regret, and fleeting joys.
The author captures the quiet struggles of everyday life with warmth and occasional tension in this subtle exploration of aging, loneliness, and human connection. In the first story, “Daredevils,” a couple moves through a strained Sunday morning after the woman returns from an unexpected night away. As she gets dressed to head out for work, the narrator is reminded of the lack of excitement in his life as he watches a pilot pull off daring stunts in a nearby field. Dissatisfaction with the realities of adult life is a common theme, also cropping up in “Rain,” in which 46-year-old Carl wakes up after a drunken argument with his teenage son. After storming out of the house, Carl is clipped by a kid on a bicycle, whom he then spends the rest of the story trying to track down; his misguided pursuit escalates into an embarrassing standoff with a group of boys on the boardwalk, revealing Carl’s fear, anger, and difficulty with letting go. The vulnerability and helplessness that comes with aging are movingly depicted in “Dancing Guy,” in which an evening on the boardwalk finds a man named Eddie tap-dancing for Jack, his eccentric neighbor, and a woman named Roz. This is interrupted by a tense confrontation with two punks, highlighting the lack of dignity afforded to those on the margins of society. Bennett ends the collection with “Messes We Made,” the tragic tale of two lifelong friends who grow up drinking and lifeguarding along the Jersey Shore. The story deftly charts the slow unraveling of one of the friends, Phil, whose alcoholism leads to his divorce and the loss of his job. The narrator struggles to reconcile nights when Phil insisted they had plenty left in the tank and Phil’s lonely death. Throughout these stories, Bennett displays a gift for turning ordinary moments into rich, emotional landscapes, though the sheer number of the pieces gathered here can make this a slog at times.
The minutia of daily life, transformed into affecting narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781969421037
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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