A rich, relentless—if overlong—tale of violence and the men who wield it.
Theodoridou’s “Bluebeard” retelling asks if monsters are born or made.
An unnamed stage actress sits in her apartment, telling her young son a fairy story. Urged on by the ghosts of blood-drenched women that only she can see, she speaks of a boy born in a stately home. A curious, perpetually hungry child with sharp nails and pointed teeth, the boy is abandoned by his spectral mother and soon-dead father, and doted on by his wet nurse, Agnes. He seems to bring a curse upon the village—the crops suffer blight year upon year, walls crumble, a young girl’s skin peels from her bones. When Eunice, a villager who played with the boy as a child, moves into the manor as his lover, the furious townspeople storm the gates with pitchforks, and the young couple flees. A shotgun wedding in a roadside chapel makes Eunice the first of his many abused and blighted wives, and the only one to bear him a son of his own. Young Tristan grows up determined to take revenge on his father—and the narrator’s son listens with bated breath. Theodoridou interweaves teller and tale to dizzying effect, leaving the reader to relish in some satisfying uncertainties. The narrator’s own career staging shows about violent men adds a delicious metatextual twist. “Easier to tell you of a man who was a myth, a natural disaster, a fairy-tale thing,” the narrator concedes to her son, “than to say your father is a wife-beater, a rapist, a murderer.” Unfortunately, the book’s length outstrips its conceit—a dense, dark gem of a story becomes frustratingly repetitive. The carousel of murdered wives, rotting fruit, and blood-soaked gowns evokes the cyclical horrors of abuse, but the eventual predictability soon dulls the narrative’s edge.
A rich, relentless—if overlong—tale of violence and the men who wield it.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781963108194
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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