An earnest if opaque journey into a country’s troubled past.
A melancholy tribute to an early champion of Ukrainian independence.
This novel by veteran author Maljartschuk alternates between the first-person narration of a present-day Ukrainian scholar and third-person history about Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882-1931), a forceful advocate for Ukrainian statehood. It was a difficult case to make, with Russia claiming the region for itself and many Poles arguing that Ukrainians weren’t ethnically distinct. But Lypynskyi, along with a handful of fellow writers and coffee-house revolutionaries, spearheaded a passionate defense of Ukrainian identity—he wrote the first Ukrainian almanac—even if few rushed to join in. (“The Ukrainian community is a flock of naïve sheep ruled by wolves,” one man observes.) Meanwhile, the narrator develops a passion for Ukrainian literature and becomes a writer herself, discovering Lypynskyi’s story when she uncovers his obituary in an old newspaper. Maljartschuk parallels the woman’s illnesses and failed romances with Lypynskyi’s own poor health, unhappy marriage, and exile in Vienna. “The world had ceased to be a place where one could be sure of oneself,” she observes for both of them. Maljartschuk’s story is of course relevant in 2023, and she is expert at merging history and metaphor (whales and mythical figures are woven into the story); the fragmentary approach echoes Olga Tokarczuk’s sober fictions of eastern Europe. But the story is often sluggish, relating the two protagonists’ experiences in a sometimes stiff translation. Lypynskyi was a complicated figure, a stubborn monarchist who alienated his colleagues and was prone to pomposity. (“Not a single voice stood in my defense when the froth that now grows into moss on the wreckage and spreads befell me.”) That makes him hard to get a fix on. Maljartschuk has chronicled the ferment of the independence movement and its legacy, but the storytelling’s digressiveness and mood sap its force.
An earnest if opaque journey into a country’s troubled past.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781324093220
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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