What lengths will a mother go to in order to keep her child safe? In “Hollow Bones,” prolific author Jodi Picoult demonstrates both what a mother’s love can mean in terms of a loving parent and self-sacrifice, and the polar opposite, what happens when a mother abdicates all responsibility for a daughter’s welfare. And along the way in this emotionally fraught novel, we come to see different types of love and the life-changing results that emanate from flawed humans making mistakes.

Molly Fitzgerald was two months old when her mother was killed as she went to a doctor’s appointment at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Molly was luckier than some; she had her mother’s best friend Evie, who stepped in and became Molly’s mother. Evie married Molly’s father Adam, and although Molly missed the mother she never knew, Evie gave her all the love she could. Because the 9/11 disaster played such an important role in Molly’s life, she ended up as the Chief of the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Rhode Island Department of Health.

Toward the beginning of the novel, Molly attends the 25th anniversary memorial of 9/11 in New York City. One of the many ways in which Picoult excels as an author is her ability to write incredibly insightful narrative that brings situations to life as they also make us reflect on the human situation. Some of her writing is pure poetry, as when she describes the ceremony and the trumpeters. “They play Taps in a call-and-response that sounds like a conversation, until a solo note hangs in the air, like the smoke and dust and shock that hazed the city for weeks.” What a stunning, emotional sentence to describe the beauty, the poignancy, and the sorrow of that moment.

Now Molly is married, and when she discovers that she is pregnant, unplanned, it brings back many of the emotions she had growing up and wondering about her own mother. Will Molly be a good mother? Given her profession as an emergency planner, she clearly is able to imagine worst case scenarios. In fact, that’s a game that she plays with her husband Jesse. Interestingly, Picoult has chosen to feature someone from a past novel in this one. Jesse was an important character in “My Sister’s Keeper,” a novel that was published in 2004, about a sister who was conceived to donate her umbilical cord stem cells to her sibling with cancer. When the bodily donations ended up with the sick sister needing a kidney, the healthy sister, Anna, pursued medical emancipation, thus enabling her to make her own medical decisions. That novel has a huge twist at the end, and in that novel, Jesse was a troubled teenager, the third sibling to the two girls at the center of the tragedy.

Now Jesse is a detective and polygraph expert. There’s a certain irony there because much of this novel focuses on the lies we tell each other — big lies and little lies. We tell lies to protect ourselves, lies to protect others, and lies to get what we want. And sometimes, those lies can upend our lives. As Jesse points out in his first person narrative, “Really, the only thing you can say for sure about lying is that you’ve done it. If you say you haven’t, well. That’s a lie.” At one point in the novel, he lies to Molly because, as he explains, “the truth is too painful to speak out loud.”

While Picoult has chosen to tell the story in alternate timelines, there’s no confusion about what happened when. The dates of each chapter are clearly labeled as is the narrator. Molly narrates much of the story, but so do others. To fans of Picoult’s prior novels, the fact that the plot is complex, with many balls being juggled at once, and new balls thrown into the mix as a twist, will come as no surprise.

Picoult seems almost heartless as she presents us with horrifying event after horrifying event, each one more troubling than the previous. But what she’s really doing is explaining why people have their own demons. Even when a person appears to have it all, to be admirable and successful, we never really know what that person has suffered, what that person has experienced, and how that person might be privately hurting. The story includes sexual abuse, mental illness, altruistic killing (caused by post partum psychosis), natural disasters, and the fallout from seemingly harmless lies told with seemingly good intentions. We see different kinds of mothers, from exemplary ones to mothers simply trying to do their best. We also see the very worst type of mother — one who turns her back when her child is being abused.

In her author’s note, Picoult says that “everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were the morning of 9/11.” I was in my first year of teaching, with my fifth graders, and when we heard about the first attack, I turned on the television in my classroom. And while in retrospect I don’t know why I wasn’t fired for this, I had the students watch the news as it happened. I told them that this was something that would change their lives and the lives of all of us in the United States. I remember one of my students saying that we should go to war, and it started a discussion about the vicissitudes of war, and that every soldier is someone’s brother or father or son. “Hollow Bones,” published 25 years after that event, similarly demonstrates the long-lasting effect that this tragedy has had on the American psyche.

Jodi Picoult’s brilliance, what makes each of her novels thrilling, gripping, emotional, and heartrending, is her incredible ability to take impeccable research and combine it with characters whom we admire and empathize with, and put them in situations that we can’t turn away from, situations that may be heart-stopping, gut-wrenching, and tear-inducing, but which hold us riveted to the pages of the story as we fly through the novel to find out how she will make it all right in the end.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.