Published By: Michael Joseph
Pages: 464
Released On: 05/11/2026
I reach up and unravel my braid. When my hair is loose and whipping around my face, I take the red ribbon I’ve woven through it and press it just beneath my mother’s etched name, underlining. She was here. She was mine.
When Molly Fitzgerald was two months old, her mother went to a morning appointment in downtown New York.
Like so many who left their homes on September 11th, 2001, Molly’s mother never came home. Now Molly saves lives for a living, running a department for when disasters strike.
Molly and her husband Jesse – a police polygraph expert with his own fractured family – have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world.
But then Molly’s whole world is turned on its head. She’s spent her life preparing for catastrophe. But nothing could prepare her when a disaster strikes too close to home.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Michael Joseph for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I own or have read every single one of Jodi’s published adult novels, and she is always a go-to when a new one comes out – most of the time I don’t even read the synopsis, I just order, so I was thrilled to receive an early copy of this.
I have found it really hard to review without spoilers, but I am going to try. It means it will be a shorter review than normal because I think you need to go into this book completely blind to get the most out of it.
I expect twists or surprises in Jodi’s novels; they’re not thrillers so they don’t need some gasp-out-loud thrill, but there’s always something, however subtle, but this book had them left, right and centre. You would think that would be too much but they really work. There’s one particular part…how do I say this without spoilers…we meet characters that are from another of her books which blew my mind.
Everything is so vivid; the setting, characters, memories, grief – you’re right in there with everyone and it’s a gorgeous, if tough at times, book to rad.
I read it just after the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which made it all the more poignant. I felt it was more powerful than her others, and I wonder if it’s because it’s feels so relevant. Other books of hers I’ve read include things like organ donation, school shootings, abortion clinics etc. and these are things I have been lucky enough not to experience in real life. Yet there is no-one old enough who wasn’t and isn’t affected by 9/11 so it felt all the more real.
It’s a long book, about 100-150 pages longer than I like, but it never feels it. It’s so addictive and so layered and intricate that you are absorbed and you zoom right through it.
This will break your heart again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and then leave you awash with love. It’s up there with her best.
