This appealing family tale offers astute characterizations and a panoramic view of the 20th century.
A novel tracks a family through the first half of the 20th century, with all its good times and bad, focusing on the clan’s quotidian hopes and dreams.
The story begins when Belle Brand’s life intersects with Isaac Kaplow’s while she is watching Charles Lindbergh take off on his historic 1927 flight. Belle and Isaac marry during the depths of the Depression when life is hard, but they are deeply in love. They survive and begin to prosper. Soon come two daughters, Sophy and Vivie. Readers follow the family’s fortunes through the Depression and the decades after—with flashbacks to Isaac’s previous life in Europe. The story covers the World War II era, the 1950s, the ’60s, and so on (and the family’s move from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island). And then the headlines: the Holocaust, the March on Washington, Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt, and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, each with its own shocks and moral reverberations. Through a peculiar happenstance, Belle and the artist Larry Rivers become edgy friends (he paints her portrait), and other luminaries—Frank O’Hara, Leonard Bernstein, Nell Blaine—make appearances. Then readers watch the daughters, the mostly dutiful Sophy and the beautiful, unpredictable Vivie, grow up and find themselves. Through it all, the Kaplows persevere. Silman is a much-published writer, sure in her craft and very insightful. Belle can be a worrywart, but Isaac is the rock, the mensch. Sophy and Vivie find not only themselves, but also good and caring husbands. This is, in fact, an old-fashioned novel, the sort of engaging book that readers can slip into like a warm bath, and the Kaplows are the kind of people the audience will remember long after the last chapter. Readers certainly don’t lack for stories of chaos and calamity, so the current, much abraded world needs this type of tale more than ever. In the last chapter, the author writes that love “is more than a madness; It is the protection against all that awaits us, our only defense against the hurts and truths of this uncertain, clamorous world.”
This appealing family tale offers astute characterizations and a panoramic view of the 20th century.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Campden Hill Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
