Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.
In parallel narratives spanning a century, a woman and her great-grandmother grapple with generational trauma through their interpretations of a tarot deck.
The narrative begins with a traumatic scene of sexual assault. The survivor is Wanda Justice, a 17-year-old girl raised by her single mother in small-town Alberta, Canada. She burns down the abandoned church where the rape took place, enacting the novel’s title for the first of many times. Cut to 1916 in Scotland, where another sexual assault occurs, this time of Sheena Firth. As a result of the assault, Sheena becomes pregnant with Sadie, Wanda’s great-grandmother. Jumping forward to 1999, Wanda struggles with the aftermath of her own assault. The novel also charts Sadie’s travels as she makes her way from the farm where her mother was raised in Scotland to her present-day home in Canada. Both Wanda and Sadie are comforted by the introduction of tarot into their lives. Using their intuitive powers, they’re able to self-reflect on their decisions and prepare for coming difficulties. For example, the cards alert each of them to future problems with the men in their lives. The novel is entrenched in tarot lore; the 22 chapters correspond to the cards of the major arcana, the named cards in a standard tarot deck (the Empress, the Fool, etc.). Representing the trauma and resilience passed down from Sheena to each of her descendants, the women pass a tarot deck from mother to daughter. Coulter provides each character with a distinct voice, preventing confusion despite shifting chronology. Although the linking of Sheena’s trauma to that of her descendants is occasionally heavy-handed, as when Sadie says that Sheena’s “trauma belongs to all of us,” still the theme of women empowering women makes for a timely, poignant novel with shades of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) and Miriam Toews’ Women Talking (2018).
Riveting family saga with themes of female empowerment creatively tied to tarot lore.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039166943
Page Count: 299
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
