Two stories juxtaposing the lives of a mother and daughter across two cultures; the former leaves a bigger impression.
A recent college graduate struggles to reconcile her Iranian Muslim heritage and immigrant family dynamics with her British life and boyfriend.
Soraya Nazari doesn’t know what she wants. Her family wants her to be a good Muslim girl, but her father and siblings aren’t good models, her scientist mother complains about her husband but wants her daughters to fit into old molds, and Soraya herself is confused about how to inhabit her faith. When Magnus Evans, a popular rugby player and fellow graduate from her university cohort, shows an interest in her, she convinces herself that seeing him is just practice for getting over her hang-ups. But as Soraya and Magnus draw closer, another narrative unfolds in flashbacks—the story of how Soraya’s parents, Neda and Hossein, fell in love in Iran in the 1970s and how migrating to England unraveled their marriage. While the contemporary story is a familiar new-adult drama of young people starting their professional paths in a big city, making romantic gaffes, and weaning themselves away from family neuroses, Soraya’s relationships to Islam and immigrant culture add a layer to the standard arc, calling to mind works like Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha At Last. Simultaneously, the interspersed chapters of how Neda and Hossein's love fractured as migration and racism had their ways with them, followed by Hossein's descent into substance abuse and the mysterious absence of their oldest daughter, read more like women’s fiction, with its female protagonist’s troubled personal life and her journey to overcoming patriarchy. Its effect on Soraya, namely her emotional skittishness and existential angst, is explained convincingly—particularly through an explosive incident of domestic violence—and it's clear that her story is about discovering herself before she commits to a man. The novel also dislodges Whiteness from its typical central position in both genres, with Soraya’s friends being people of color with distinctive personalities.
Two stories juxtaposing the lives of a mother and daughter across two cultures; the former leaves a bigger impression.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-35717-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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