In Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult, When people go through a traumatic experience, they deal with it in their own way, doing the best they can with the hand they were dealt. 
In Molly Fitzgerald’s case, she took the fact that her mother died in the 9/11 attacks in the South Tower and turned it into becoming the Chief of the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness. Molly knows she can’t stop emergencies from happening. But if she can mitigate the disasters as well as account for everyone involved then she and her team have managed to accomplish something positive. Molly was only two-and-a-half months old when she lost her mom. So, she has no actual memories of Eloise Ambrose. But her father and stepmother have shared enough over the last twenty-five years to feel like she knows who she was as a person, wife, and new mother.
‘I am one of more than three thousand kids who lost a parent in the attacks on 9/11. I was less than three months old at the time.’
Now Molly is married to polygraph expert Jesse Fitzgerald, and they are embarking on their own journey together, both of them fighting the good fight to keep citizens safe. But just as the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 is looming large, new information about what happened that day to Molly’s mother comes to light and changes everything in an instant. There are already a lot of changes happening in Jesse and Molly’s lives. And the new details have them contemplating what they can trust and viewing everyone differently. As they band together to sort it all out, they’ll have to rely on their strong bond and their work expertise to figure out the best way to tackle the changes–without hurting their loved ones’ feelings in the process.
“It’s easy to love someone you’ve put on a pedestal,” he says. “But it’s a lot more impressive to love someone you haven’t.”
Jodi Picoult’s books are an EXPERIENCE. As a whole, they are filled with important, timely messages often about controversial subjects, and are deeply, deeply emotional. But HOLLOW BONES was unexpected on many levels. Touching, harrowing, complicated, relatable, dark, hopeful. It will take a long time to unpack everything it brought out of me as well as sort through all of the intricate details Picoult layered into this incredibly moving story.
‘Sometimes you get a second chance. But no one tells you how brief it may be.’
I would be remiss to not warn readers first about the litany of content warnings because it honestly felt like I should have said: Everything You Can Thing Of. HOLLOW BONES touched upon the 9/11 attacks, Covid pandemic, trauma and disasters, families disintegrating, assault, mental health, and more. But the way Picoult wove everything together was genius. And extraordinarily compelling.
This was not always necessarily an easy book to read given some of the subjects. But as the main characters’ lives ebbed and flowed around each other and the pieces became clearer in how they all were connected, it was raw, felt genuine, and was so easy to get absorbed in that I just couldn’t put it down. And the further into Molly, Jesse, Georgia, Evie, and Adam’s lives I wandered, the more I was pulled into their dynamics and complex journeys.
THEMES:
👩👧 Complex mother/daughter dynamics
🔥 Age-gap romance
🫶 Found family
🧠 Mental health awareness
🤫 Family secrets
💔 Complicated relationships
🌱 Healing & second chances
CW: View Spoiler »
There is really no way to review HOLLOW BONES without spoilers if I mention any specifics about the characters because there were so many layers to it all. Suffice to say that if you’ve read anything by Picoult previously, you’ll understand what I mean. At the heart of this, though, were rocky family relationships as well as dynamics between mothers and daughters, and the longing for truth and belonging. Things that the majority of us can understand. And with the visceral response I had to this, I can only imagine that most readers will also be left with a whole host of emotions while they hold these characters in their hearts for quite some time to come.
QOTD: What was the last book you read that stayed with you for a while afterward?
Book Info:
Publication: Published: September 15th, 2026 | Ballantine Books |
From the #1 New York Times bestselling 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.
Amy R
QOTD: What was the last book you read that stayed with you for a while afterward? The Obsession by Nora Roberts
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