What do you think?
Rate this book
The White Hot: A Novel
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.
“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.
Audible Audio
First published November 11, 2025
161 people are currently reading
9344 people want to read
About the author
Quiara Alegría Hudes
19 books351 followersQuiara 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 263 reviews
September 12, 2025
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.
📅 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.
June 8, 2025
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.
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.
November 3, 2025
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.
December 19, 2025
“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.
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.
December 11, 2025
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.
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.
November 5, 2025
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.
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.
October 15, 2025
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!)
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!)
June 29, 2025
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.
December 1, 2025
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!
May 25, 2025
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.
October 26, 2025
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.
May 24, 2025
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.
A brilliant epistolary novel, and a love letter to complicated mothers and daughters.
December 8, 2025
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.
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.
November 15, 2025
"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.
November 17, 2025
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.
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.
November 19, 2025
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.
December 24, 2025
4.25 stars - Even though I found parts of the first half a little slow, the writing is phenomenal and the second half picked up. Full review to follow.
Want to read
May 25, 2025Epistolary are hit-or-miss for me, but this premise has me INTRIGUED
October 25, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and One World for an advanced reader copy of The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.
The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes is a short but devastating novel written in letter form from April to her daughter Noelle. April’s life has been full of rage, what she calls her “white hot”, and she has been struggling to get by since becoming a teen mother. “A mother is a life sentence, after all.” At age 26, she hits her limit and simply walks away. What follows is a reflection journey of independence. “Leaving you was a kind of death and in its wake the world’s beauty was almost unbearable.” 10 years later a letter to explain her abandonment arrives.
Even at only 176 pages, this novel is not an easy read. It was difficult for me to identify with April’s life struggles, to read about the generational trauma, and her subsequent choices. I focused on the raw, unflinching and lyrical writing style but got lost amidst some of the tangents. The writing style was not as engaging for me, but the exploration of motherhood and self-discovery left a lasting impact. 3/5⭐️
The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes is a short but devastating novel written in letter form from April to her daughter Noelle. April’s life has been full of rage, what she calls her “white hot”, and she has been struggling to get by since becoming a teen mother. “A mother is a life sentence, after all.” At age 26, she hits her limit and simply walks away. What follows is a reflection journey of independence. “Leaving you was a kind of death and in its wake the world’s beauty was almost unbearable.” 10 years later a letter to explain her abandonment arrives.
Even at only 176 pages, this novel is not an easy read. It was difficult for me to identify with April’s life struggles, to read about the generational trauma, and her subsequent choices. I focused on the raw, unflinching and lyrical writing style but got lost amidst some of the tangents. The writing style was not as engaging for me, but the exploration of motherhood and self-discovery left a lasting impact. 3/5⭐️
November 17, 2025
A day late on this review, when I saw a review in last week's LA Times (I am behind on that also), I realized the book came out yesterday, so ran to read it.
A very poetically written story of a too young mother running away, leaving her brilliant 3rd grade daughter, Noelle, with her grandmother.
Leaving Philly, April Soto is searching for herself.
The story is told in a letter left for her daughter to read on her 18th birthday. A story of anger and despair, April narrates 10 days of escape that 1 found difficult to believe she survived.
The author is a playwright and essayist, so the novel feels theatrical.
This is the kind of book that will be loved by some, and will feel difficult to others who may take it too personally. Can an abandoned child ever feel whole. The ending is hopeful.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest review.
A very poetically written story of a too young mother running away, leaving her brilliant 3rd grade daughter, Noelle, with her grandmother.
Leaving Philly, April Soto is searching for herself.
The story is told in a letter left for her daughter to read on her 18th birthday. A story of anger and despair, April narrates 10 days of escape that 1 found difficult to believe she survived.
The author is a playwright and essayist, so the novel feels theatrical.
This is the kind of book that will be loved by some, and will feel difficult to others who may take it too personally. Can an abandoned child ever feel whole. The ending is hopeful.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest review.
October 30, 2025
Can love ever look like leaving? Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegria Hudes seeks to answer this question in her new novel, The White Hot, publishing November 11th. This is an epistolary novel. One long letter a mother, April, writes for her daughter to open on her 18th birthday about her abandonment. It is not an apology. It is an explanation. It is not an ask for absolution or forgiveness. It is an ask to be heard. An ask for her daughter to determine the kind of woman she might be after learning more about her mother. A letter to plunge into the daughter's and readers' core right before the birthday candle plunges into the cake. And oh did this get to my core.
Through this long letter, which doesn't really feel like a letter, we learn about April's past and what might have led her to make this decision. She says she had to escape in order not to die. The days of escape she writes about are hard to describe, just like the idea of "white hot". I know what I mean if I say "white hot rage" or "white hot pain", but I can't really put that to words. That is for the novelist to do. And oh does Alegria Hudes do it. In some of the most gorgeous sentences I've read all year. It reminds me a bit of All Fours meets Blue Light Hours but make it way darker with a disconnected relationship.
This mother daughter story will make you ache. There is so much there in so few pages. What is a 26 year old supposed to act like when they feel like a teenager for the first time? What is freedom and what cost does it come with? Does this mother deserve any sort of absolution or forgiveness even though she isn't asking for it if love can ever look like leaving? There are no answers given, but you'll be left with a perfect ending.
Through this long letter, which doesn't really feel like a letter, we learn about April's past and what might have led her to make this decision. She says she had to escape in order not to die. The days of escape she writes about are hard to describe, just like the idea of "white hot". I know what I mean if I say "white hot rage" or "white hot pain", but I can't really put that to words. That is for the novelist to do. And oh does Alegria Hudes do it. In some of the most gorgeous sentences I've read all year. It reminds me a bit of All Fours meets Blue Light Hours but make it way darker with a disconnected relationship.
This mother daughter story will make you ache. There is so much there in so few pages. What is a 26 year old supposed to act like when they feel like a teenager for the first time? What is freedom and what cost does it come with? Does this mother deserve any sort of absolution or forgiveness even though she isn't asking for it if love can ever look like leaving? There are no answers given, but you'll be left with a perfect ending.
December 13, 2025
Quiara Alegría Hudes’ debut novel, after years of prize-winning playwriting, brilliantly depicts a young Latina mother wrestling with conditions that produce white-hot rage. I’m impressed that Hudes kept me on our main character’s side despite the MC’s questionable decision-making.
November 30, 2025
This book is a wonder. I tore through it on a Sunday morning but it was in no way an easy read. How could it be, when the book is actually a mother’s letter to her daughter, whom she abandoned 10 years earlier? It’s heartbreaking and surprising and so beautifully written. I didn’t know anything about the author before starting this book, but her long list of accomplishments came as no surprise given this masterpiece. She wrote In The Heights!
November 16, 2025
wowzers!! read it in 2 sittings. one of the best books i’ve read this year.
November 6, 2025
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)
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)
May 20, 2025
The White Hot really caught me off guard—in a good way. The first thing I noticed was the format: it’s written entirely in letters, with no chapters at all. I didn’t expect to like that, but it actually made the book feel super personal, like I was reading someone’s private thoughts. I ended up loving how raw and direct it felt.
The story jumps between past and present, and mixes memories with deep self-reflection. Sometimes I had to pause to figure out where I was in the timeline, but honestly, that worked for the story. It reflects how the main character is feeling—kind of lost and trying to piece things together.
At the heart of it, this is a story about a mom walking away from motherhood, and it doesn’t sugarcoat that decision. It digs into big questions about identity, culture, and what it means to take your life back. It’s not always easy to read, but it’s really powerful.
The story jumps between past and present, and mixes memories with deep self-reflection. Sometimes I had to pause to figure out where I was in the timeline, but honestly, that worked for the story. It reflects how the main character is feeling—kind of lost and trying to piece things together.
At the heart of it, this is a story about a mom walking away from motherhood, and it doesn’t sugarcoat that decision. It digs into big questions about identity, culture, and what it means to take your life back. It’s not always easy to read, but it’s really powerful.
December 17, 2025
Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy!
The White Hot is an unusual but often such a beautiful book. I read this short novel over the span of a couple of months. I'm not sure why it was often difficult for me to read, but there is something so tender in the language and subject matter that made it hard for me to return to sometimes.
"No bite returned Noelle Soto to my arms. [...] I had no interest in being sacred just then, only alone with my obliterated conscience and the lingering ecstasy of an unearned glimpse."
April Soto had her daughter Noelle at age sixteen. When Noelle is ten, April leaves for ten days, finds Noelle's father and his family, and leaves Noelle with him. This novel is mostly a letter from April to Noelle about the ten days she was gone and the heart-wrenching process of leaving her daughter.
There are many quotes I kept. This novel deals with motherhood, generational trauma, domestic violence, and many heavy topics with such a gentle touch. However, I found the voice to be a bit confused sometimes. At the same time April will call it Chef Boy RD, she will also make Whitman metaphors. I think that the voice works for the most part, I quite like the mixing of tone. But there are some sentences that are so literary they feel kind of unnatural for anyone to say in a letter.
I have already recommended this book to a few people. I think it is definitely not a light read, but a very beautiful one that needs some space for thinking.
The White Hot is an unusual but often such a beautiful book. I read this short novel over the span of a couple of months. I'm not sure why it was often difficult for me to read, but there is something so tender in the language and subject matter that made it hard for me to return to sometimes.
"No bite returned Noelle Soto to my arms. [...] I had no interest in being sacred just then, only alone with my obliterated conscience and the lingering ecstasy of an unearned glimpse."
April Soto had her daughter Noelle at age sixteen. When Noelle is ten, April leaves for ten days, finds Noelle's father and his family, and leaves Noelle with him. This novel is mostly a letter from April to Noelle about the ten days she was gone and the heart-wrenching process of leaving her daughter.
There are many quotes I kept. This novel deals with motherhood, generational trauma, domestic violence, and many heavy topics with such a gentle touch. However, I found the voice to be a bit confused sometimes. At the same time April will call it Chef Boy RD, she will also make Whitman metaphors. I think that the voice works for the most part, I quite like the mixing of tone. But there are some sentences that are so literary they feel kind of unnatural for anyone to say in a letter.
I have already recommended this book to a few people. I think it is definitely not a light read, but a very beautiful one that needs some space for thinking.
November 11, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and One World for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. This is a book written in the format of a letter but, almost reading as a sort of confessional or personal, intimate testament of the narrator, April’s, account of this period in her life. She writes this letter to her grown daughter, Noelle, explaining why she decided to leave her.
This book was beautifully written and so so good! The author manages to capture the narrator’s inner emotions and experiences with such poignancy and the “white hot” rage/feelings that drive the narrator are so viscerally raw. My heart broke for this narrator as I read through the circumstances building up that drove her over the edge and I felt frustration, compassion, empathy for her in watching her reactions. When I first read this book and watched April go through various episodes, after leaving Noelle, like her time in the forest, with art, with violence, I did struggle to figure out where this fit into her overall story and her decisions to ultimately leave her child but, this story tied together by the end. I do want to go back and reread this book, knowing the path of the story, to see what themes and insights I can pick up now.
I hope this book gets the attention it deserves. The prose alone is so exquisitely written, capturing human experiences in such an “on the nose”, poignant way that the reading experience is worth it for those lines alone. This book does cover intense, heavy emotions but, I did not feel that it was overwhelmingly difficult to get through. This book is a quick read and I would highly recommend to literary fiction readers!
This book was beautifully written and so so good! The author manages to capture the narrator’s inner emotions and experiences with such poignancy and the “white hot” rage/feelings that drive the narrator are so viscerally raw. My heart broke for this narrator as I read through the circumstances building up that drove her over the edge and I felt frustration, compassion, empathy for her in watching her reactions. When I first read this book and watched April go through various episodes, after leaving Noelle, like her time in the forest, with art, with violence, I did struggle to figure out where this fit into her overall story and her decisions to ultimately leave her child but, this story tied together by the end. I do want to go back and reread this book, knowing the path of the story, to see what themes and insights I can pick up now.
I hope this book gets the attention it deserves. The prose alone is so exquisitely written, capturing human experiences in such an “on the nose”, poignant way that the reading experience is worth it for those lines alone. This book does cover intense, heavy emotions but, I did not feel that it was overwhelmingly difficult to get through. This book is a quick read and I would highly recommend to literary fiction readers!
December 21, 2025
This book quickly brings the reader into it's fold. The majority of the book is a letter from a young mother, age 26, to her 10 year-old daughter, only to be read on the daughter's 18th birthday.
I became quickly absorbed into the protagonist's dilemma of whether she should return to her young daughter who she abandoned or stay on the road and continue to find herself. As a reader, I had sympathy for the main character.... as a mother myself, I criticized this action. And herein lies the carefully crafted balance between selfish and self-less love that a mother can have simultaneously after having a child.
The main character is caught in the middle of generational poverty and being told that she is exceptionally bright for someone with her background (Puerto Rican) by the school principal. The reader is pushed into each scene feeling very uneasy about the decisions April, main character, makes. Will she be a complete train wreck? Will she return to her daughter? Will she continue to journey onwards without her daughter? How will she overcome tremendous odds that are against her no matter which decision she decides?
There is a push and pull at the heart strings all throughout this book.
I became quickly absorbed into the protagonist's dilemma of whether she should return to her young daughter who she abandoned or stay on the road and continue to find herself. As a reader, I had sympathy for the main character.... as a mother myself, I criticized this action. And herein lies the carefully crafted balance between selfish and self-less love that a mother can have simultaneously after having a child.
The main character is caught in the middle of generational poverty and being told that she is exceptionally bright for someone with her background (Puerto Rican) by the school principal. The reader is pushed into each scene feeling very uneasy about the decisions April, main character, makes. Will she be a complete train wreck? Will she return to her daughter? Will she continue to journey onwards without her daughter? How will she overcome tremendous odds that are against her no matter which decision she decides?
There is a push and pull at the heart strings all throughout this book.
June 23, 2025
(ARC - out 11/11/25 via Random House) This is a short novel, clocking in under 200 pages, but my god, is it powerful. It is an epistolary novel, written from a mother, April to her daughter, Noelle. April abandoned Noelle when Noelle was eight, and Noelle is about to turn eighteen when she receives this letter from her mother. The story is about April’s life since leaving Noelle, and of April trying so desperately to find the parts of herself that will make her happy and whole. The writing is spiky and sharp, but simultaneously tender and beautiful. April isn’t asking for forgiveness from Noelle, just trying to make sense out of what happened that led to her leaving and what has happened since then. The title of the novel comes from the name April has given to her anger, a kind of anger and frustration that pushes her to leave her unhappy home and not come back. I found the narrative voice of this so compelling, so interesting, I couldn’t stop reading. This is a character study in every possible definition, written by an author with a beautiful way with words and a lot to say about what it means to be a woman.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 263 reviews