Well-plotted historical fiction whose strong focus on character development never impedes the pacing.
A Jewish girl searches for her family in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Christiansen’s historical novel.
Sarah Morgenstern is only in her early 20s at the end of WWII, but she’s already witnessed the death of her sister and was separated from her parents when she and her family were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Yet this novel is not really about Sarah’s trials in the Łódź Ghetto or her suffering at Auschwitz. It opens, instead, with her liberation from the Wobbelin camp by American soldiers after the war, though flashbacks reveal the traumas Sarah endured during the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath of gaining her freedom, Sarah is still stuck at the camp waiting for the sick and dying to be evacuated first; she knows that she must find her missing family soon. Fluent in several languages (her father was a language professor in Berlin), Sarah eventually takes a position as an interpreter for the American soldiers, and she works with them to try to locate her parents. Among the Americans who offer her support is a young Jewish soldier from Chicago named Ben Lehmann. Sarah and Ben seem to have a connection and constantly reunite during Sarah’s efforts to find her family. As her search for her family progresses, Sarah must also decide how to move forward with her life: Will she return to Berlin? Will she join some of the women from the camps and move to Palestine? Or will her relationship with Ben blossom into something serious? Christiansen’s attention to the postwar period is compelling, particularly in a literary landscape saturated with Holocaust fiction. After the war, Sarah’s life is in flux. But the author parlays this uncertainty into an absorbing bildungsroman about a woman finding her way in life. Occasionally, Christiansen’s prose can be overly reliant on anaphora and repetition (“Her dreams sent her on interminable voyages, train rides east, train rides west, train rides northwest, train rides southeast, back and forth, back and forth, ending up nowhere”), and the dialogue and conversations often prove too repetitive. But the novel’s strengths are its characters, especially the determined Sarah, who will no doubt serve as an inspirational heroine.
Well-plotted historical fiction whose strong focus on character development never impedes the pacing.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9798897400324
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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