Hollow Bones, by Jodi Picoult | Free Audiobook
The woman who plans for disasters, and the one nobody planned for
Molly Fitzgerald spends her working life getting ready for disasters: she runs the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response, which means her job is to imagine the worst thing that could happen and have an answer ready before it does. That instinct is not something she learned professionally. On September 11, 2001, when Molly was two months old, her mother left for an appointment in Lower Manhattan and never came home.
She was raised by her father and the stepmother who came after, and she grew up certain that the world is a place where things break without warning. Then she met Jesse, a police polygraph expert with a history of crisis of his own, and the two of them built something that worked: two people who know exactly what can go wrong, choosing each other anyway.
Then something happens that neither of them had a plan for. The marriage becomes a question instead of an answer, and both of them have to look again at everything they believed about the other. Fifteen hours and thirty-nine minutes, read by four narrators.
Jodi Picoult has written thirty novels and she knows exactly what she is doing, which is both the pleasure and the trap of this one. What she does better than almost anybody is take a real and contested subject, research it until you feel slightly embarrassed about how little you knew, and then hide it inside a family you cannot stop reading about. Here the subject is crisis: the ones we plan for, the ones we cause, and the ones we survive and then have to live inside. Kirkus gave it a star and called it impressive, important and fun to read, and for once the promotional line is accurate.
The construction is the part I admired most. The book runs on two timelines, which is standard Picoult, but it uses them to do something more interesting than suspense: it lets you watch a marriage being built in one direction and dismantled in the other, so that every warm scene carries a shadow you would not otherwise notice. The 9/11 backstory and the pandemic years are not decoration either, they are the weather the characters live in. And there is a small gift for long-time readers near the beginning: a character from My Sister's Keeper turns up, which fans will spot immediately.
If there is a warning to give, it is the one Kirkus gave first, so I will simply repeat it: the list of trigger warnings for this book is long, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness. Picoult does not use any of it for shock value, it is the actual subject of the novel, and the author's note at the end explains exactly where the material came from and why she wrote it. But knowing it in advance is fair, because this is not a book you put on in the background while you do the dishes, and there were moments in the middle where I found the accumulation heavier than I wanted from an evening of listening. Kirkus also raises an eyebrow at the fifteen-year age gap at the centre of the romance, which is a fair observation about a relationship the novel very much wants you to root for.
On the audio side, the production is one of the strongest arguments for listening rather than reading. There are four narrators, including Picoult herself, and the handovers between timelines and points of view are clean enough that you always know where you are without being told. Rebecca Soler carries the emotional weight, MacLeod Andrews handles the procedural side, and having the author read her own afterword at the end lands exactly as it should.
My verdict: a strong, generous, occasionally overwhelming novel from an author who has earned the right to write exactly what she wants. If you are new to her, this is not the gentlest place to start, Small Great Things is a better doorway and it is on the site.
Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult follows Molly Fitzgerald, who plans for other people's disasters for a living, and whose own mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and never came home.
It runs 15 hrs and 39 mins, read by Rebecca Soler, MacLeod Andrews and Julia Whelan. You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like.
Once you claim it through the trial the book stays yours to keep even after you cancel, and you spend the trial on whichever title you like. Fifteen hours is a good long stretch of listening.
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