A brilliantly rendered novel raises crucial questions about identity, justice, war, and belonging.
The love affair between a Canadian grad student and an Israeli soldier grows increasingly complicated.
Sacks’ latest novel begins with a deceptively simple premise: A young woman falls passionately in love with an even younger man. Allison is a grad student visiting Israel from Canada; Eyal is on the verge of invading Gaza. She’s 27; he’s 19. At first, the story seems basic to the point of cliché. But Sacks quickly veers into territory much more troubling and complex. Just as Eyal is beginning to question the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza—and, by extension, his own—Allison is learning to silence her own questions. “I was finding that I liked myself better in Hebrew,” she tells us, “a language in which I had so much less to say.” Allison’s family, we learn, isn’t close—she and her sister have grown apart, and her parents are distant. In Israel, on the other hand, she finds herself fully embraced by both Eyal’s family and the country at large: “Nothing in my whole life had ever felt as good as being welcomed not just into a family but into a people,” she says. What’s most disturbing in this brilliantly rendered book is not the age difference between the lovers, not the war, but the way that Allison gradually learns to manipulate her own thoughts. “I could say to myself, ‘That was racist’; saying Death to Arabs is racist—but also,” she thinks, “I understood the feelings behind the words.” Desperate to belong, Allison engages in increasingly pliable mental gymnastics to justify her thoughts and actions. Sacks’ depiction of those mental gymnastics is astounding. Sometimes, it’s true, Sacks can be heavy-handed, repeating explicitly what is already implicitly clear. But this is a minor complaint. As a whole, the book—and Allison’s transformation—is deeply unsettling, and Sacks’ talent as a novelist who takes on thorny, multifaceted, unanswerable questions is clearly unmatched.
A brilliantly rendered novel raises crucial questions about identity, justice, war, and belonging.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780063284234
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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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