A crafty, page-turning spin on chronicling Black family history.
An intriguing hybrid of historical romance and fantasy suggests that going back in time may be one way to weed out generational trauma.
“My family tree has poisoned roots,” Cecily Bridge-Davis announces at the start of this haunting saga about the “curse” of time travel. It is May 1964 and Cecily, an African American professor of history, has come into possession of her father’s 65-acre patch of Virginia farmland. When she leaves her Tennessee home to see what’s there, she finds an empty cabin, a spool made from a maple tree, and a family Bible with a yellowed flyleaf listing the names and birth dates of every Bridge family member born on the farm from the 1760s to the 1920s. She also hears from an elderly local about a long-ago murder-kidnapping implicating one of her ancestors. Which turns out to be slightly less shocking than discovering the reason why some of those ancestors vanished for decades: One Bridge offspring in each generation is somehow transported back in time. She also finds a map with locations of strange containers along with a list of “Bridge Family Rules” for time travel: “Never interfere with past events.” “Always carry your freedom papers.” “Search for the survival packs in the orchard.” “Do not speak to strangers unless absolutely necessary.” Cecily presses her inquiry into the family’s temporally peripatetic history all the way back to the 18th century and such precursors as Luke, whose tumble through time takes him from freedom to slavery and eventually into the Continental Army, where he undergoes the travails of Valley Forge. After her forays in the library for more information, Cecily herself is compelled to leave 1964 for 1911, where she takes a different identity and eventually gets a teaching job in circa 1924 Washington, D.C., where she tells one of her students, a young woman named Amelia Bridge, that they’re related and that “Millie” must make the most important time jaunt of their shared family history. Sometimes all this gets even more complicated than it reads here. But Madison shows considerable skill and narrative control. To her credit, it’s hard not to be reminded of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, as well as The Time Traveler’s Wife and some of Ray Bradbury’s time-displacement stories.
A crafty, page-turning spin on chronicling Black family history.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780063290594
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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