An evocative historical yarn with plenty of Southern charm.
Maier’s historical novel follows three generations of a Georgia family through the tumultuous 1800s.
Roy Bowers, an army veteran who fought under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812, moved to Macon, Georgia, and built a thriving construction business. Now, in 1833, approaching his 50th birthday, Roy is beginning to feel restless. His oldest son, Buck, works closely by his side in the company. His middle son, Jeremy, is in Athens, Georgia, studying to become a lawyer. And Tim, still in his teens, has dreams of making his fortune in prospecting. When Roy’s wife, Helen, is tragically killed in a carriage accident, the patriarch decides to make some changes in his life. Several months earlier, when the government appropriated Indigenous lands in northern Georgia, it held a lottery for white settlers; Roy was awarded a 160-acre lot in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, “out in the middle of nowhere.” He turns over the operation of “Bowers Builders” to Buck, and he and Tim head north with plans to raise horses and cattle. Roy brings his Black stable hand, Samuel, and Samuel’s 20-year-old son, Kitch, with them to help clear the land and build a house. Across the river from Roy’s property, they meet their soon-to-be neighbor, the prosperous farmer Waya Madstone. Waya is a wealthy Cherokee man married to a white woman, a factor that has likely contributed to his ability to keep his property during the forced removal of Cherokees. Maier’s atmospheric, ambling saga, which unites these two families through the marriage of Waya’s teenage daughter, Willow, to Tim Bowers, chronicles the development of the fictional slate-mining area that, through the efforts of Roy and Madstone, develops into a town. The author addresses the social issues of the day, including slavery, bigotry, and the government’s treacherous treatment of the Cherokees, with a light touch, avoiding in-depth discussion of the atrocities. The four main protagonists are likable, fair-minded characters caught in the turmoil of the times, hoping to avoid a civil war but ultimately dragged into its horror. The multiracial diversity, both within the family and among the close friendships, adds a hopeful, positive tone to the novel.
An evocative historical yarn with plenty of Southern charm.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781950308606
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Scribblers Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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