The White Hot: A Novel

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.

“The White Hot has the effect of pressing your hand to a barbed live wire. April’s is one of the most memorable voices I’ve encountered in recent fiction. . . . [A] brilliant depiction of a woman learning to transform her rage into something resembling transcendence.”—The New York Times Book Review

A BEST BOOK OF THE NPR, OPRAH DAILY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOKPAGE

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Latinx, Mental Health, Adult Fiction

167 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 11, 2025

About the author

Quiara Alegría Hudes is a writer, barrio feminist, and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include a Pulitzer-winning drama, Water By the Spoonful, and a Tony-winning Broadway musical, In the Heights (co-authored with Lin-Manuel Miranda). Her screenplay adaptation of In the Heights opens in movie theaters nationwide this June.

Along with her cousin and a dedicated circle of volunteers, Hudes founded and runs Emancipated Stories, a collection of pages written by people who have been or remain incarcerated.

Reviews

[SinsandScares · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
📅 Pub Date: Nov 11 2025

I loved the format of this book being a letter from a mother to her daughter. It gave the story a raw, confessional tone that felt both intimate and devastating. April’s life is built on simmering rage, exhaustion, and survival. Working herself to the bone, raising her daughter from a teen pregnancy without the father’s support, and at best, just barely making it through. There is little joy here, only the weight of expectations and sacrifices until one day, April simply can’t take it anymore. She walks away for ten days that turns into ten years.

This book confronts so many powerful themes: racism, immigrant family struggles that echo across generations, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, generational trauma, and the burden of simply being a woman. I found myself highlighting so many lines. Hudes’ prose is lyrical and sharp, full of moments that stopped me in my tracks.

Where it lost me was in the abstract detours and lengthy inner monologues. April often becomes deeply reflective, and the narrative drifts into territory that went over my head. When the story was moving forward, I was fully engaged, but when it slipped back into abstraction, I found myself drifting. That may come down to personal preference, since Hudes is an award-winning author and many readers will probably love those moments.

What stuck with me most was April’s anger and how relatable that felt. The way rage simmers beneath the surface until it finally boils over, the double standards between men and women, and the crushing weight of expectations. And while I won’t give away too much, I loved the ending Hudes gave us. It was bittersweet, complicated, and powerful in the way it reframed freedom and motherhood.

Overall, The White Hot is a heavy and emotionally raw story. It didn’t fully work for me in style, but the themes and ending left an impression.

Thank you to Netgalley, Random House, and Quiara Alegría Hudes for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Leaving you was a kind of death and in its wake the world’s beauty was almost unbearable. The tide I beheld was seismic and stunning: an existence always happening yet always about to happen, dots on a river here and gone, centuries passing with all the heft of bee wings. All surged, all flowed. And this: it was a world worth noticing. A fact you’d been hip to since day one, from the first crayon I placed in your palm. You had grabbed it and a second for the left, fisted them and scribbled, covering the page and the floor around it, trying to help me understand. Look, Mami. Look. Look. Look. Look.”

I have been circling around this quiet storm of a book like a wolf for the past hour, because I do not know where to attack it from. It moves too fast. It contains too much. It emits too much heat, not only from the blaze of its title, but from the warmth of the mother’s dimpled thigh on the cover, and the chubby little feet of a child balancing herself on her lap. One is rooted. The other almost in flight.

Motherhood.
A joy too dazzling to stare at directly.
A death by a thousand mindless, humdrum cuts.
Two things can be true.

Being alive is a spectrum. Motherhood can sometimes crush that band of colors into a puddle of muddy beige, until there is no such thing as the rainbow. Obliterated. Still.

In Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours”, I always thought the most moving character was Laura Brown. The mother who left. The mother portrayed on the screen by Julianne Moore, whose heartbroken voice utters this truth: “It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.”

Sometimes, mothers cannot bear the flattening.
Sometimes, true love can look like leaving.

And so this book. A burning. A letter. A reclaiming.

This is a wild, raucous, daring, inconsolable, kaleidoscopic, jazzy, raw, tender, intricate, smoldering work of art about a mother who chose life.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Follow me on Instagram @jcgrenn_reads

THE WHITE HOT

LOOK. This book comes out in November, ok. NOVEMBER. (Will we even have books by then?) (what on earth will November 2025 even mean or be!!)

And yet—I opened it to take a peek and see what it was about. I dunno, I don’t always do that or anything. I get a lot of books in the mail—some get a look, some go to the shelf or the desk. But some just feel special when you hold them. Books are magic right? I guess this one really proves it.

Electric and fiery and whatever powerful, elemental landslide of a metaphor you want to use for it—That’s The White Hot. This book is the book of 2025, there I said it. Let me have this cliche, please! This book’s perfect.

An 18 year old woman gets a long letter of from her mother she hasn’t seen in almost a decade-an explanation, a justification. Not an apology but definitely a love letter. We then read the letter in its entirety.

It’s not an epistolary novel, or wait is it? Yes I guess it is, but the best one I’ve ever read. my GOD. The musical language, the scenery, the emotion seeping from every sentence. It’s funny, it’s serious. My chest hurts. It’s like if Jesmyn Ward and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio teamed up to write a feisty Philly feminist knockout novel, packed to the brim with one liner wisdom, poetry and LIFE.

I don’t know. I’m really sucking this sad excuse of a review up because I experienced one of those books that did it so good I’m left incapable of saying what I mean.

This is your National Book Award winner, Rumaan Alam! Keep your fiction committee in line and don’t let them mess it up! This one gets the gold circle on it, and probably more.

Okay, Bye, going to go read it again now I guess.

[DianaRose · Rating 3 out of 5]

firstly, thank you to the publisher for an arc!

this is an epistolary-eqsue novel from a mother to her daughter recounting the moments (as well as the years) up to her sudden abandonment of her daughter and family.

our mother, april, was a teen mom in a family of only women — all of the men up and leave sooner or later — and was “ripe with potential” but struggled with anger issues, which she dubbed as “white hot” ; i loved how the author described the white hot’s slow but steady rise in not only april, but her daughter noelle as well.

i also listened to the audio, and the narrator did a fine job.

——

squeezing in the audiobook in between all of my other current reads😅

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mother, April, abandons her daughter and family and writes a letter ten years later explaining what happened. This book leans into the confession and shares an intimate if ultimately untidy perspective on motherhood and rage. I enjoyed the prose and Hudes is great at voice, she makes April come to life. There is an ugliness to April and how she sees the world that was fantastic, and that pulled me in at the start. By the end, it lacked the movement necessary to sustain an all vibes, no plot novel.

[Tini · Rating 5 out of 5]

When love looks like leaving.

"Do not absolve me, do not forgive me, only hear me, consider my story."

In The White Hot, Quiara Alegría Hudes delivers a raw, luminous, and deeply human meditation on motherhood, rage, and the terrifying grace of walking away. Told as a letter from a mother to the daughter she abandoned, this novel is both confession and defiance, guilt and transcendence - a reckoning and a prayer in the same breath.

April Soto, a twenty-six-year-old mother raising her young daughter in an intergenerational Philadelphia home, feels herself burning alive. When her rage - the "white hot" - finally crests, she walks away from her entire life, but especially from her child. What follows is ten days of freedom that stretch into ten years of reckoning, as April wrestles with the consequences of her actions and what love means when it requires distance.

Hudes' prose is incandescent: poetic yet plainspoken, tender even when it's blistering with anger. Her writing perfectly captures the contradictory fire of motherhood itself, and the story reverberates with questions of forgiveness, faith, and the inheritance of pain - how trauma seeps through generations, and how breaking free can look like breaking apart.

As both a daughter and a mother, this book about loving and leaving absolutely floored me. I listened to the audiobook, co-narrated by Daphne Rubin-Vega and the author herself, which is extraordinary. Their performances carry the full ache and beauty of the text - wry, rhythmic, and unflinchingly intimate. Listening feels like being entrusted with something sacred: not absolution, but understanding. Nevertheless, this is one of those cases where I preferred the physical book - to underline, to take notes, to linger over every sentence.

"But how, God? How can love look like leaving?"

The White Hot is a mother's howl and a lover's lament, an often incomprehensible yet deeply human act of self-immolation and rebirth. A magnificent, moving, and sometimes infuriating meditation on love, loss, and the unbearable necessity of saving yourself first.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

April Soto is a Puerto Rican woman from Philly whose rage has the stamina of an Olympic athlete and whose love life could be sponsored by Bad Decisions Incorporated. She is also the mother of Noelle, a terrifying child genius who expresses her intellect by publicly terrorizing ninth graders with graphing calculators. Real bonding stuff.

The book shuttles between April writing directly to Noelle and April narrating the wasteland of her past. A blended mix of a memoir, a confession, a therapy session she refuses to pay for, and a punch thrown at the school principal.

Young April is brilliant but allergic to stability. Schoolwork thrills her, boys disappoint her, and her temper keeps landing her in suboptimal situations. Eventually she becomes a mother way too early.

As an adult she works a mind numbing office job where she alphabetizes the sins of a construction company and briefly pretends the world is quiet. Meanwhile Noelle keeps recreating April's childhood greatest hits: fights, detention, and arguments with authority figures who were not warned enough about the Soto family brand.

The story detonates when Principal Giron gives mother and daughter matching tickets to Anger Management Class, the worst mother daughter activity ever invented. This cracks something open inside April.

On top of that, April starts a relationship with a widower named Kamal, a man held together by grief and impeccable jazz taste. Mingus becomes April's emotional chiropractor, adjusting her rage until it clicks. Of course, nothing this soothing can be allowed to stand, so the white heat flares and April nearly self destructs, which is her usual love language.

After things with Kamal implode in slow motion, April has a full existential jailbreak. She bolts from Philly to Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, a place that sounds made up and feels like a forest created specifically to smack her around emotionally. There she becomes one with nature, blisters her way through trails, hallucinates meaning in moss, and sleeps on a rock that gives her the first warmth she has felt since maybe the womb.

Nature does not fix her life. It just tells her she is tiny and mortal. But it does crack open that volcanic anger long enough for her to send a final message back home by not sending any messages at all. Noelle, clever little menace, seems to understand this is freedom disguised as abandonment, or abandonment disguised as freedom, or maybe both.

The book circles everything April cannot control: motherhood, girlhood, rage, love, institutional failure, cultural inheritance, and the way trauma makes a nasty habit of reproducing itself.

But it also circles what she can control: telling the story to Noelle, truthfully, painfully, almost tenderly. The whole thing is a love letter written with a blowtorch.

The book is irritatingly good. I kept trying to nitpick it but it kept handing me line after line that were too clean, too frank, and too gorgeously bewitching. Hudes has a feverish musical energy that is part confession and half improvisation. It is chaotic in the way real people are chaotic. You end up believing every sharp edge of it even when you wish the characters would take a nap or maybe consult a quiet hobby.

It is essentially a study in how anger shapes a life. April moves through the world like her emotions are plugged into a faulty electrical grid, and the book never treats that as a shameful defect. The mother daughter dynamic is complicated, jagged, and weirdly loving, which is probably why it works.

The book also digs into how difficult it is for a woman to grow into adulthood while carrying every possible expectation and wound. It says a lot about connection, too, the way we try to make ourselves understood even when we have no blueprint for that kind of honesty.

The writing is alive, the structure is bold, and the emotional core is surprisingly tender under all the heat. It gives you plenty to think about in a rather slim package.

If you need characters who behave responsibly and plotlines that tie their shoes neatly, this will drive you up a wall. If you want something raw, vivid, and unwilling to pretend life is tidy, then this one absolutely earns its place on your bookshelf.

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, WOW! No wonder this author is a Pulitzer Prize winner. THIS is how you tell a story! This book is written as a letter from a mother to her young daughter, received years after the mom walked out. April is a single mom with a fierce temper living in a multigenerational home. Her daughter is not an easy child, and the entire family lives in close quarters on a tight budget. One day, April reaches her limit and just…leaves. The letter shares the story of what happened next.

If you were to describe the plot of this book to me without my having read it, I would not expect to like it. Like, what do you mean a woman abandons her child so she can eat, pray, love? But it’s so beautifully written that it just works. And it raises important questions about double standards. While April’s life was completely thrown into upheaval when she became pregnant as a teen, the guy who impregnated her was able to totally dodge the responsibility (and go on to have another family) with no one thinking the worse of him. There’s a passage in this book about how April’s girlhood, teen years, and adulthood overlapped too much. Burdened with responsibilities at a young age, she didn’t get to enjoy a carefree adolescence.

I loved this book so much and will certainly eagerly devour other works by this author.

[Yahaira]

oh god, mom is a slam poet.

[Dona's Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME meets Sinners (2025 film by Ryan Coogler).

Pre-Read Notes:

The title and cover for this drew me in. And I can't help but adore stories of complex mother-daughter love, so this seemed like a perfect choice. The opening is riveting, I have to say, and it makes me wonder what form this story will take. Looking forward to this read!

"...I answered my own prayer. When it comes to sex, we can do that. Be our own imperfect answers. There is no secret key held by some mystical wizard. There is only the permission we give ourselves to feel how it really feels." p53

Final Review

My Favorite Things:

✔️ I think it would be wonderful to grow up with stories like this about your people, your women. "Once upon a time there was an abuela whose pot of café did overflow. With a grain of rice and droplet of water she fed four generations of Soto women, letting love dry the tear at the corner of her eye— from cataracts, not regret." p12

✔️ The form of this short book -- of a mother writing a letter to her estranged teenage daughter -- really works here.

✔️ "It was his f--king kindness, all over me like a bad sweat. Miraculously I hadn’t trashed the joint, but this was the whitest and hottest I’d been in years." p17 Damn, when that pain is too hot to allow softness... or sense. I can relate, because of how human Hudes lets these characters be.

✔️ Wonderful use of comedic relief. "They showed me the park map and pointed out a kayaking spot, some rapids and horse trails, a snowmobile path they’d negotiated one winter through a blinding blizzard. (“ We actually perished in the snow. You are driving with ghosts now,” Pregnant Girl smirked.)" p27

✔️ 😭😭😭 "I want you to know everything I didn’t. How good it can be and how pathetic, too. And how, despite those extremes, no single f--k can save or destroy you." p52

✔️ I like this repeating image: "But how , God? How can love look like leaving?" p100

Content Notes: parental abandonment, teen pregnancy/mothering, grief/guilt/forgiveness,

Thank you to Quiara Alegria Hudes, Random House, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of THE WHITE HOT. All views are mine.

[Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 !

A blistering novel about motherhood, heritage, identity and abandonment.

April is a young mother, who can't stop thinking about the life she gave up to raise her daughter, when she was only a child, herself. This is a legacy in and of itself, handed down to her by her mother, who was once full of a potential all her own.

After she is consumed by what she refers to as the White Hot, she leaves her life behind, embarking on 10 days of freedom. It's only 10 days, but at the end, everything is different. To return, is to be faced with an impossible choice.

I loved the integration of letters in this. I thought the handing down of stories in this way, allowed for the reader to really feel that we are someone's daughter, before anything else.

When we are in April's hands, I felt like the story was equal parts meditative and gutting. But the ending was my favorite part. It really surprised me.

I think stories like this are so important, in a way that I struggle to articulate, but can feel so deeply, while I read them. Which is to say - I thought that this was magic.

(Thank you to the publisher for the early review copy!)

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts out very promisingly then, for me, proceeds very unevenly. In the form of a letter to a daughter abandoned ten years previously, it forms an apologia of sorts. Its major strengths are apparent in that aspect, however the plot kept getting in the way for me as April wends her way. The improbability was too difficult for me to overcome, a shame since there is some truly magnificent writing here.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the last page has turned. It’s pedal to the metal right from the jump, a torrent of words written by a mother, April, and addressed to the daughter she left behind.

Unable to handle the white hot, the name given to her uncontrollable and blinding anger, passed down from mother to daughter, unable to reckon with her lost potential, with the time she gave up to being a teen mom while her daughter’s father was able to pursue his education, to start a family, to get a mortgage, the only way out April sees is to leave. Dropping her ten year old daughter off with the father she’s never known, April sets off to claim those ten years that she gave up, it’s her turn.

In the form of a letter to daughter, to be given to her on her eighteenth birthday, April gives a raw confession, an explanation for where she’s been and why she had to do it. It’s fiery, it’s unrelenting, it’s lyrical. Listening to this on audio only heightened the experience, the words come alive, their cadence and rhythm amplified in their oral delivery. Hudes has created a singular voice in April, her anger and hurt are felt in every word, we empathize with her resignation to her lot in life and hesitantly celebrate her eventual reclaiming of the life she never had because it came at the expense of her daughter growing up without a mother.

A stunning debut with writing I’m not soon to forget.

[Ivana Balnožan]

Teška, sirova, mračna - fenomenalno napisana.
Ipak, nismo savršeno kliknule, Ejpril (junakinja) i ja.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know this took me forever to get through, but it was something my husband and I started in November and were listening to it together. It wasn't until this past week where we were able to take enough time to finish listening to this together. I know you're probably wondering how I could remember what I had previously read. Let me tell, this is not an easy book to forget. The MC is one of those people that you will remember for a long time. The book is basically a letter from April to her daughter Noelle explaining why she left her. At first, you feel sorry for April. She had been a teenage mom when she had her daughter, lives paycheck to paycheck with her daughter, her mom, and her Abuela. Life is pretty shitty. Her daughter acts like a brat, she is stuck in her job, her life, and her sanity until one night she loses it and takes off. I get it. Kids are not easy, family members can be rather annoying, and when your existence in this world feels mundane, you don't feel like you have a whole lot going on and no one would care if you lived or you died. I honestly understand why she took off. April is gone for 10 days. In that time she begins to discover alot about herself. She did some things that started making me question if she was suffering from so much more than depression, anxiety, and uncontained anger. I started not liking her very much. When she eventually gets back to her daughter she does the unthinkable and I began to hate her. Pure, white hot hate. How she did some of the things she did was unfathomable to me. In the end, she did do what was best for her daughter. I still hated the woman. She made me sick to my stomach and angry. Nobody died or was hurt physically, but sometimes mentally can be worse than anything else. I won't spoil the ending, but this is so worth the read.

[Gigi Ropp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dripping with raw emotion tucked into stunningly sharp prose, The White Hot tackles motherhood, freedom, abandonment, pain, and love beautifully. This may be my favorite book this year!

[Hannah_likes_to_read · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will likely edit this later but wanted to jot down some of my thoughts while they’re still fresh. This was absolutely incredible. As someone who sees her books as sacred and doesn’t often dog ear or annotate, I broke my rule for this one. There were so many passages of this prose that bore into my soul that I’m considering having a few of them permanently placed on my body. THE WRITING 😮‍💨 My God. The author was able to make me both feel repulsion and relation to April, approaching her story with so much nuance and raw honesty. Reading the author’s note only further cemented my awe of this story. She was inspired to write this story by the feminine rage in Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. SAY LESS. If you’re a mother who can relate to loss of identity or agency, you need to read this immediately.

[Megan F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shit- this one was rough, but so beautiful. The way this author writes is like sitting and listening to someone stream of consciousness talk their way through something so incomprehensible, but so necessary to parse through. This novel is short- but absolutely effective in its brevity. My chest ached at the end, but it stopped at exactly the right point in the story. Being a mother is hard, being a daughter is hard, being a woman in this world is hard. This book discusses these themes with honestly, unflinchingness, and a directness that I very much appreciated as a reader. So grateful to have received this arc through netgalley and the publisher.

[Gaby · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not very often that a narrative voice shakes me awake like this. The author, by way of the narrator, writes with boldness, fury, and life itself.

A brilliant epistolary novel, and a love letter to complicated mothers and daughters.

[Novel Visits · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rarely do I mark as many passages as I did while reading 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗧𝗘 𝗛𝗢𝗧 by Quiara Alegría Hudes. This book is written as one long letter from a mother to her daughter on her 18th birthday. April had walked out of Noelle’s life 8 years prior and her letter is an attempt at explanation. Through April’s words we learn of the generational trauma experienced by the women in her Puerto Rican family, and how, in April, that trauma grew explosive.⁣
⁣
For me, the first half of this slim book was a bit slow, but dang! The second half really picked up. Throughout, I was awed by the writing. Hudes won the Pulitzer for Drama in 2012 and has been nominated for two additional Pulitzers, so this comes as no surprise. Thus, to finish out this review, I want to share a few passages I loved.⁣
⁣
“I sat there wondering how to stack up each cell of my anger like bricks. How to stitch each thread of my fury forward and sew a garment from all that rage. A coat, a blanket, a cloak of mourning under which we could huddle together. Me and you, Noelle, in a shelter made of my shortcomings.”⁣
⁣
“...cleanups by Soto women predated the floorboard, predated Mamá Suset and even Abuela Omara. That an army of broomed ancestors stood at their backs, sweeping tears under rugs. That clean ups were my inheritance.”⁣
⁣
“I prayed a girlhood awaited you even as I annihilated it….This tattered rage of hope was enough for me to pin a future on.”⁣
⁣
“Freedom is a brutal assignment with many punishments. Conformity’s punishments can be even harsher, though they’re often less visible.”⁣
⁣
Simply beautiful. ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫✨
⁣
A special thanks to @happiestwhenreading for gifting me this book!⁣

[Aubrei K (earlgreypls) · Rating 1 out of 5]

i really did not like this at all😭

I’m child free by choice and am so intrigued by social conventions when it comes to motherhood - so i love reading books about the unspoken traumas of motherhood. However, this was just not for me.

- Felt very lackluster. It’s a letter written from a mother to her daughter but she is talking about her life and past in a non-chronological order that had me feeling lost. At no point did I feel like I had a decent understanding of the timeline or even the stories being told.

- There is zero reason a letter like this should be written to your child. Your therapist? Sure! To yourself? Definitely! To the child you abandoned? So inappropriate 😫

- Very melodramatic. It might have been the audio narration but I was just rolling my eyes the whole time at the dramatized storytelling, word choices, etc. I think the mother is in her late 20s/30s by the time this letter was written but it seemed like it was written by a teen (maybe that was the point since she was a teen mom? Stuck kind of in that age? Idk but it was annoying)

[Sam Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Twenty-six-year-old April Soto writes a letter to Noelle, a gift for her daughter’s eighteenth birthday. In the letter, our tough protagonist explains the moments leading up to her leaving Noelle on a whim, and her later decision to leave Noelle’s life. She describes a white hot feeling inside her prior to escaping their home in Philly, unsure of what solution an unplanned vacation could bring. Still, she leaves Noelle with Mamá Suset and Abuela Omara, following the lineage of men who have left the women in their family, and takes a trip in the woods. With newfound freedom, April walks barefoot in the bramble, encounters bears, and meets Kamal on a sunlit rock. Her relationship with him ends as quickly as it begins, yet it opens another world of possibilities for her, ones in which she honestly considers why she should live and how she and Noelle can both be untethered from their family’s past.

Hudes’s writing is unabashedly rhythmic and senses-driven. Perhaps reminiscent of slam poetry, the story is told with energy and feels meant to be shared aloud, which works insofar as The White Hot is shorter in length. Given the poetic style, it was unclear whether April literally shares a memory or reveals a thought through metaphor, as in her physical treatment of Kamal.

Most significantly and fundamentally to Hades’s project, I was unsure about April’s decision to abandon Noelle. I remain unconvinced this was the wisest decision (much less wise), even if April’s primary goal is to give herself agency, thus choosing to leave Noelle. April’s secondary goal seems to be ending the generational trauma plaguing their family. In theory, if the point is to highlight an attempt at reaching a good goal, doing one’s best as a parent, and still coming up short, this would make more sense (I’m unsure if this is Hudes’s point). As such, regardless of one’s preference for whichever model of a family, the abandonment aspect seems to create a net value of problems that outweigh the pros presented in Hudes’s mommy-guilt novel.

Furthermore, Hudes’s decision to match this storyline with April’s overall rough-around-the-edges exterior to counterbalance the melodious writing didn’t ultimately come together for me.

My thanks to One World and NetGalley for an ARC.

[Aly Lauck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely good writing!

[Barbara Powell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah I didn't get this book at all. Why would you write this to your child? To yourself maybe. To burn possibly. Maybe oven to a therapist? But your child doesn't need to know all the sordid details of what you did after you abandoned them. Besides that, it was just meh. It was not in chronological order so I never felt like 1 completely understood where she was coming from and she just felt sorry for herself instead of the child she left behind was hoping for something much better than what i got. No thanks
Thanks to One World and NetGalley for this Arc in exchange for my reviow.

[Miray Tunac · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will never read a book recommended by Goodreads. Ever. Again.

[Cortnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Anger is a precondition of generosity, venom transformed to water on wounds. The nobility in that. The discernment. The faith.

This is a beautifully written book about motherhood, generational trauma, how we accept the love we think we deserve, finding oneself and the sacrifices we make to break the cycle. It asks the question of how love can be found in the leaving. This is messy, searing, and at times uncomfortable, but wow, the prose are stunning.

This story is told through letters from April Soto to her daughter. April is angry. She is angry at the life she sacrificed to be a teen mother, angry at her mother and grandmother for the abuses they endured, angry at her daughter because she is a mirror to April. Finding solace only in her Beats headphones and a locked bathroom door, April is pushed to the edge and leaves her multigenerational home to embark on a 10-day journey. She has no plans, no money and no car. Traveling from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh she begins to find out who she is without the burden of being responsible to anyone but herself. In this period, she experiences an unraveling and then a determination to do what she needs to for herself and her daughter.

I did have some minor issues with pacing, as we went down stream of consciousness rabbit holes with April that it felt took up too many pages for the length of the book. Otherwise, I found this extremely compelling and more of these types of stories need to be told.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eArc.

[CJ Alberts]

A god damn heart breaker. Perfect to me

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful and devastating short novel that is primarily told as a mother's letter to the daughter she abandoned 8 years before. Just bursting with life and love.

[Janessa Juarez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess this is an unpopular opinion because this book has been on so many “best of 2025” book lists… but it did not hold my attention. And is just so odd. I enjoyed the ending, but it wasn’t worth suffering through the rest.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

Epistolary are hit-or-miss for me, but this premise has me INTRIGUED