Small Great Things [Paperback] Picoult, Jodi

Ruth Jefferson is a Black labor and delivery nurse with twenty years of spotless experience. When a white supremacist couple demands she not touch their newborn, the hospital complies. Days later, the baby goes into distress on Ruth's watch — and she hesitates. The infant dies. She's charged with murder. What follows is a legal thriller that dismantles the comfortable lie that not being racist is enough, forcing Ruth, her white public defender, and the reader to confront the systems that separate good intentions from actual justice. Picoult doesn't flinch from the ugliness, and she doesn't offer easy answers. The courtroom scenes crackle with tension, but it's the quieter moments — Ruth's fury, her dignity, her exhaustion — that stay with you. For readers who want their fiction to challenge them, not comfort them.