A delightfully peculiar meditation on imagination—as maladaptive crutch, creative tool, and steppingstone to peace.
In Polek’s debut novel, a woman fastens herself to reality through the spectral projection of a creative icon.
Gia is floundering against a deepening depression: She’s on leave from the college where she teaches and is recovering from a breakup that is, by her account, entirely her fault. Then she writes a letter to Marta Becket, a (real-life) artist, dancer, choreographer, and actress who died in 2017. She’s read Marta’s memoir and writes: “I wonder if you, too, are able to see my life in full, and could be brought down to attend to it.” She mails the letter with a watercolor in place of an address. A week later, Marta is on her porch wearing lime-green shoes, conjured by her imagination. The intensity of Marta’s convictions and accomplishments awes Gia—her life and passions seem incredibly grand, nothing like the modest ripples of Gia’s mother and grandmother. Marta quietly cares for Gia, offering distraction, completing household tasks, and turning her gaze to art, but still this is not enough for Gia to “leave the things that make [her] small.” She strikes out alone, first to a cottage in some indistinct woods and then to Death Valley, where Marta’s most gleaming relic, the opera house she breathed into life, still stands. Polek creates striking, high-contrast images of each place Gia floats, half-tethered to her worldly connections and responsibilities. Though she has one eye trained on “the despairing antipossibility of [her] past” and one on “the possible despair in [her] future,” her narration burnishes each thing she encounters, collects, considers, and leaves to rot in her present: “a deer, with its eyes eaten away by fish,” a “small crooked pear tree,” “rabbit stew with mushrooms.” Gia stumbles into healing like a fawn, but her breathtaking sensitivity makes this rebirth story worthwhile. As all quotations and biographical details attributed to Marta are genuine, the novel also acts as an introduction to the life of a fascinating artist.
A delightfully peculiar meditation on imagination—as maladaptive crutch, creative tool, and steppingstone to peace.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452837
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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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