An earnest and empathetic family drama.
Two couples confront the consequences of infidelity in small-town, post–World War II Ohio.
Over a span of more than 30 years, the small fictional town of Bonhomie provides the setting for this quiet story about the lives of two families irrevocably changed by a brief affair. Cal Jenkins, precluded from military service by a congenital orthopedic condition, marries hometown girl Becky Hanover and takes a job managing her father’s hardware store. Becky discovers that she possesses the power to communicate with the afterlife and conducts free seances in the couple’s home. Their otherwise unremarkable lives are forever upended after a brief encounter between Cal and Margaret Salt in the store on VE Day leads to a romantic entanglement. Margaret and her husband, Felix, arrived in Bonhomie in 1939, when his employer brought him there to help manage its aluminum plant, but as the war in Europe reaches its end they’ve been separated for more than two years by Felix’s decision to enlist in the Navy and his assignment to a cargo ship in the Pacific. Ryan skillfully explores his characters’ emotional vulnerabilities, among them Calvin’s insecurity about his physical impairment and his disappointment over his inability to serve his country; Becky’s ambivalence about her spiritual gift; Margaret’s psychological scars from having been abandoned by her mother mere days after her birth and a childhood spent shuttling between an orphanage and foster homes; and Felix’s issues with his sexual identity. The fallout from Calvin and Margaret’s brief affair reverberates through the lives of these families in a booming postwar America as each goes on to raise a son who must face the prospect of serving in the Vietnam War. In subtly different ways, Ryan creates considerable sympathy for each of his characters while taking care not to tip the scale in favor of any one of them. The novel’s only flaw is a deliberate pace that may leave many readers wishing it had proceeded more swiftly to its undeniably moving final scenes.
An earnest and empathetic family drama.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593595039
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
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