Hollow Bones
A Novel
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4.5 • 201 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of By Any Other Name comes a riveting novel about the risks we take to protect the ones we love in a world where crisis is always just around the corner.
On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn’t have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters.
Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse—a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis—have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew.
Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jodi Picoult turns a woman’s lifelong fear of catastrophe into an intensely emotional story about love, parenthood, and the limits of being prepared. Molly was just two months old when her mother died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11, a loss that’s shaped the way she sees danger ever since. Now in charge of Rhode Island’s emergency response program, she has built her life around anticipating the worst. Then Molly meets Jesse, who understands that instinct better than most, and the two fall deeply in love—with gloriously written abandon. But neither love nor Molly’s hypervigilance can insulate them from what comes next. It would be a shame to spoil any of the dramatic turns in this captivating read, but Picoult confronts subjects including postpartum psychosis and child abuse with unusual compassion and emotional precision, and her afterword about the real-life experiences that inspired the novel proves nearly as moving as the story itself.
Customer Reviews
Post partum psychosis
Thank you for writing a fictional account of this very real psychiatric illness. What a timely book that more people will read to understand how little is known or understood about it. My sister had episodes of what I believe were symptoms of this illness back in 1973 and again in 1975 after each of her children were born. She was hospitalized in a catatonic state and thankfully after attempted suicide she managed to recover.
Covid Era Propaganda Dressed Up as a Love Story
One of the most disappointing of the authors many fine works. The early part of this book is riddled with belief in the lies we were told about the Covid era government lockdowns. It accepts them as truth and makes them a part of this story as if they in fact were true. Social distancing, six feet apart, plexiglass in grocery stores, masking, high death rates, insufficient ventilators, over burdened hospitals, all turned out to be untrue or greatly exaggerated. And what of the ruinous effect of isolation on families, marriages, children and their education, the gutting of small family businesses, not to mention the rise in drug and alcohol addictions, child and spousal abuse, etc. All are to be accepted as a necessary and justifiable consequence of the response to the Covid era when none of that justification has proven true. Devotees of the Biden era lies and Faucism may like this narrative, but the rest of us see it as shilling for the far left power grabbing policies of that era and the efforts to cover up the involvement of the government in gain of function research on the virus. Spare us this continued propaganda about the CDC, NIH, and government propaganda policies of that era as the background for this love story. And setting it as well against the 9/11 tragedy is just further pulling on our heartstrings. How transparent and disappointing. Move along, nothing to see here.