A worthy addition to novels about powerful women, despite some shallow glosses on character motivations.
Filled with carefully researched detail, this action-packed fictional portrait of the ancient and mysterious Egyptian empress follows her from adolescence until her end.
Cleopatra VII is a Ptolemy, heir to the throne of Egypt—but as many of us think we know, she came to a tragic end due to her ill-fated love affairs and poor military strategy. Author El-Arifi pulls from many scholarly sources to create her novel’s queen, a woman of Africa who owes nothing to future mythologizing; she’s a healer, a would-be scholar, and a fiercely loving mother. This Cleopatra lives for her people; loves freely, both men and women; and leaves little to chance, employing care and cruelty in equal measures. Her great documented loves, Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, appear, but so does her life’s companion, Charmion, not to mention her perfidious siblings, sister Arsinoe and brother Theos. At one point, Cleopatra says of her sister, “We had been close once; our secrets were each other’s. But somewhere along the paths of our lives we had diverged”— but she never explains how or why. Cleopatra goes out of her way in other sections to describe her emotions, so her silence on her relationship with Arsinoe feels odd, due both to their kinship and their eventual clashes. This lacuna might indicate cultural difference, as well as attention to context—we now acknowledge that emotions might be different depending on eras—but given the plethora of emotions otherwise imputed to this dynamic queen, it’s a puzzling omission. We also now acknowledge family estrangement, but we usually see a first-person narrator understanding why a breach has occurred. Still, this Pharaoh’s imperious ability to here don gem-laden robes, there order a royal family’s murders, or hold an intimate banquet of boar and goose is a vision of absolute power and absolute control. If Cleopatra occasionally contradicts herself, claiming to care more for her family than for her people, it seems to be such a maverick’s prerogative.
A worthy addition to novels about powerful women, despite some shallow glosses on character motivations.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593875643
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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