This compact, delightfully eccentric story has a tendency to meander.
A doughnut shop employee makes plans for an art museum and observes the lives of cartoon mice in this quirky novella.
Former high school art teacher Chicken McNugget gets hired at the local doughnut shop. He works alongside and immediately befriends Tonya, who’s enthusiastic about his ideas: Chicken dreams up an art museum that will ostensibly showcase different artists, hiding the fact that the displayed works will be his own creations. Surprisingly, his manager, Rufus, suggests making the shop part of the museum. So, Chicken works on his art pieces as Tonya drafts bios for the nonexistent artists. Meanwhile, a family of cartoon mice unexpectedly appears in Chicken’s basement room. While some of the mice attend a comedy school, where they learn how to write jokes, others train hard in the army. Bad Rat is stirring up trouble in the mouse community, not unlike the “rude” customers whom Chicken, Tonya, and others must contend with at the doughnut shop. The author serves up a buffet of amusing morsels—for example, Chicken’s unpredictable co-worker, Smitty, who sprints into traffic to chat with a potential customer, needs a job coach by his side. Some aspects of the narrative are absurdist—the antics of the mice; Chicken forms a union that his boss and several customers join—while other parts are relatable, like an orange slushie being a handy stress reliever for Chicken. The work is inconsistent in general; it’s initially stylized as a journal (with each chapter representing a journal entry), but this approach is quickly abandoned. Characters receive only scant descriptions (Tonya is introduced as having “a streak of blue in her hair”), and a scene featuring a supposed variety of “imaginary animals” comes down to cartoon mice riding therapy dogs. Still, the novella has hints of diverting fantasy and a gratifying ending that befits its overall tone.
This compact, delightfully eccentric story has a tendency to meander.Pub Date: April 3, 2021
ISBN: 9798732583922
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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