An uneven but still welcome addition to the Gregory cannon.
In the second of Gregory’s Fairmile series—after Tidelands (2019)—Venetian intrigue meets English gullibility.
When we last saw Alinor Reekie, she had been cast out of her Sussex tidelands home after being “swum” as a witch. Twenty-one years after their escape to London, Alinor and her older daughter, Alys, run a small import-export warehouse while 21-year-old twins Sarah and Johnnie are learning a trade. Now, in 1670, Sir James, Alinor’s former lover, who failed to defend her against the witch-hunters, has come into his noble estate and arrives, far too belatedly, to offer to marry Alinor. He's also hoping to claim the child she was carrying at the time of her exile as his heir, but Alinor rejects him, telling him cryptically that he has no child. There is no clear protagonist here. White-haired Alinor, “not yet fifty,” whose health never recovered from her near drowning, has been shunted into an advisory role. Into this modest but content household slinks Livia, a sultry Venetian, self-professed widow of Alinor’s son Rob, a physician in Venice who accidentally drowned. “La Nobildonna” (title courtesy of her first late husband) seeks shelter with her infant son, Matteo. Alinor is suspicious—her clairvoyance would have warned her of Rob’s death. Readers will not need second sight to distrust Livia, but it’s fun to watch her swindle—involving ancient statuary—take shape. Unsurprisingly, her long game is to ensnare the ever susceptible Sir James. In what could be a separate novel, Alinor’s brother Ned, a staunch “Leveler,” has immigrated to New England. The détente between English settlers and Native tribes is beginning to fray, and Ned, in an exposition-heavy but very instructive parallel plot, is trying his best to advocate for the Natives. However, readers will be tempted to skip Ned’s sections to see whether Sarah, also gifted with second sight, can rescue the family. Someone has to!
An uneven but still welcome addition to the Gregory cannon.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8718-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
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