Tantalizing prose carries what is essentially a cautionary tale about unintended consequences; Calder is worth watching.
The narrator of British author Calder’s eerie dystopian novel is a young woman living on an isolated island within sight of a mainland ravaged by infection.
The novel’s greatest draw is the woman’s enthralling voice, archaically formal and casually poetic. Whether her story makes sense or should be trusted is another matter. She avoids explaining why she’s ended up on the island, secure in a well-stocked bunker under a disintegrating ancient castle. Her sole companion is handsome, mysterious Crevan, who joined her some time ago and calls her Kit though it’s not her name. Although she sometimes, creepily, calls him daddy, he is clearly not her father. Nor are they lovers, although the sexual tension can grow intense. She prefers not to dwell on risk and considers Crevan paranoid. He repeatedly promises he will never hurt and always protect her, but she doesn’t trust stories about his previous life and how he was forced to kill in self-defense. Still, she’s fascinated by his explanations of the strange tattooed patches pricked onto his arm while he was a captive of what they both call backbiters, former doctors now “a-hunting” human blood. Why they’re doing so remains initially unclear, although Kit occasionally breaks away from personal obsessing to deliver treatises on how humankind has reached “the end of days” because science has lost the battle against devouring bacteria that attack not only people, but, more disastrously, plastic. Meanwhile, Kit’s happy on the island and drawing closer to Crevan. Then a half-dead woman shows up to disrupt, possibly infect Kit and Crevan’s uneasy paradise, and Kit discovers she’s willing to do almost anything to survive. Although Calder missteps with an unfortunate last plot twist into psychological melodrama, the bulk of her novel plays cleverly with contagion and bacteria as metaphors for the spread of both good and evil.
Tantalizing prose carries what is essentially a cautionary tale about unintended consequences; Calder is worth watching.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781419764660
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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