One does come to agree with the characters that the most likable of the group has been killed off.
A year after the death of their sibling, three surviving sisters are in rough straits.
Nicky Blue was the third of the four Blue sisters and, by everyone’s account, the cream of the crop—even their cold, distant mother had a soft spot for her. Though no one thought of her as a drug addict, Nicky died at 27 of a fentanyl overdose; she had become addicted to painkillers due to the unending torment of endometriosis. But now that they’ve had time to stew over it, each of the survivors can see that she should have known. Avery, the oldest at 33—she basically raised the others due to the disinterest of their mother and the alcoholism of their father—is thought of by everyone as perfect. A lawyer in London, happily married to a loving wife, 10 years sober, she’s actually utterly miserable and has begun to act out in ways that threaten to blow up her life. Bonnie, the second oldest, has already exploded hers—she ditched her career as a world-class boxer and is now likely to lose her job as a bouncer at a club in Los Angeles. Lucky, the baby of the family, is the furthest gone—a supermodel since the age of 15, she’s partying so hard day and night that even the relaxed standards of the fashion workplace can no longer accommodate her. Mellors’ sophomore novel lays a thick foundation of grief, addiction, and self-loathing before bringing these three together in New York to clean out Nicky’s stuff from their childhood apartment, which their heartless mother has decided to sell, and in short order they are just about clawing each others’ eyes out. The bad decisions, bad behavior, and bad news just keep coming until a few positive plot developments in the final chapters, then a fairy-tale epilogue. Maybe it was Mellors’ intention to challenge the reader in this way, but in the end, it seems like a lot of heavy lifting to illustrate well-worn points about sisterhood and addiction.
One does come to agree with the characters that the most likable of the group has been killed off.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593723760
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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