An evocative and raw comic that offers solidarity for survivors of sexual trauma.
In this graphic novel by French cartoonist Malle, a survivor of sexual assault finds power and support from her therapy group.
Clémence is always angry. A 30-year-old survivor of sexual assault, she’s fed up with a system she describes as being rigged against women. Consumed by rage, Clémence admits to her therapist that her other emotions are merely performative, not genuine. Malle’s illustrations punctuate Clémence’s pain by zooming in on parts of her face without showing the whole, even covering up her eyes with speech bubbles, effectively conveying Clémence as fragmented. She joins a therapy group at CALACS, a real sexual assault support center in Quebec, where the other members are introduced with similarly cropped visuals, as juxtaposed with the social workers, who are drawn whole. Other survivors of sexual assault are drawn in a variety of skin colors and ages. During her time with the group, Clémence meets Imane, a lesbian with tattoos on her light brown skin, and the two begin dating. Despite trauma triggers, Clémence and Imane’s relationship is full of warmth as they connect over shared experiences and tattoos. When Imane facilitates dance therapy with Clémence, Malle’s illustrations are squiggly and full of motion, emphasizing Imane’s teachings that therapy is about the feelings, not the aesthetic, so that survivors can safely reconnect the mind to the body. Clémence and other survivors never go into detail about their assaults. Malle instead thoughtfully centers the emotional weight of their trauma and focuses on the growth and change the characters facilitate over the narrative. And as characters journey toward agency, and as Clémence learns to find value in her anger, Malle expands the scope of her framing, showing characters as more whole. Emotions are drawn as wobbly and messy, full of tears and scrunched faces that lay a character’s experiences bare to the reader.
An evocative and raw comic that offers solidarity for survivors of sexual trauma.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9781770468702
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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