A minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know.
A wryly amusing debut novel about pretentious New Yorkers acting pretentious.
Here’s the setup: A young writer is back in New York City, at a party “surrounded by the very people that [she has] spent the last five years avoiding” (by going to Europe, of course). Sitting on a white linen couch in her hosts’ fabulous Bowery loft, where she once lived as a guest of the couple she now despises, she excoriates her frenemies and enemies in a long, acerbic, and sometimes very funny rant: rich art owners (like the hosts) who think that by buying art, they become the “sole authority on the work” and then destroy it by licensing it for advertisement or squirreling it away; “people who called themselves artists and directors but in fact worked as content creators and creative directors”; conceptual artists whose pieces interrogate “notions of whateverthehell”; and rich people who cannibalize the taste of poorer friends, remaking their shabby home decor in fancier materials. No one is spared: not the narrator herself, who thinks she’s finally made it when she starts writing articles for fashion magazines about emerging artists and “the things that they cannot live without”; not the host, a mediocre multimedia artist whose love of art “was a trompe l’oeil patina painted with shit onto the sparkling bronze bust that was his inner idiocy, his enduring alcoholism, and…his sex-pestiness”; not the narrator’s more famous writer friend, who wears shabby clothing “in keeping with his idea of himself as a serious person” and reads only contemporary American literature and nothing in translation because he has “so much prose in the original to get through.” That some writers and artists would trade their eye teeth for a chance to earn a living doing something vaguely creative might belie the book’s investment in a very small, rarefied corner of New York intelligentsia and artiness. The narrator’s funny and self-indulgent meltdown about how guilty and morally compromised she feels accepting a paid assignment to review a luxury hotel in Miami will resonate with some readers. Others will have their bags packed before you can say “real artist” or “real writer” ten times fast.
A minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668062951
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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