A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.
Well-wrought touches of the fantastic enhance this tale of a girl growing up in a Canadian logging camp a century ago.
About the time that Pearly Everlasting Hazen—named for a wildflower—is born in a remote logging camp in New Brunswick in 1920, her father, the camp cook, finds a tiny, orphaned bear cub in an ice-rimmed burrow. He brings the creature home, and his wife nurses her infant daughter and the cub together. As far as Pearly Everlasting and her family are concerned, Bruno is her brother, even as he grows big enough to unsettle strangers. The logging camps where the Hazens live are harsh places; if the work doesn’t kill someone, the weather might. Pearly Everlasting’s mother, Eula, is a healer who tends workers’ broken bones and other wounds, while her husband, Edon, keeps everyone fed. Pearly Everlasting and Bruno—and human older sister Ivy—grow up in this nurturing nest, attuned to the natural world and pretty much blissfully unaware of what’s beyond. Their only outside contact is a woman they call Song-catcher, an ethnologist who, with her companion, Ebony, travels around with cumbersome recording equipment to document folk music and tales by people like Eula. The eventual snake in this childhood paradise is a new camp boss, a bully named Swicker, who arrives with a couple of minions and soon has Bruno in his sights. An attempt to bear-nap Bruno and sell him to an animal trader is foiled with the help of Song-catcher and Ebony, but later girl and bear, teenagers by now, stumble upon a murdered body, and Bruno is blamed and confiscated. Pearly Everlasting’s harrowing quest to get him back, on foot through the winter woods and then in a town that’s a complete mystery to her, is paralleled by the search for the pair by a young man named Ansell, a worker at the camp whose face is strangely webbed with silver scars, the result of a lightning strike. Armstrong, who has published five books of poetry and two previous novels, tells their tale in lyrically striking prose and makes its fairy tale elements work by grounding them in the grim realities and stunning beauties of life in a Depression-era logging camp.
A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396142
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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