A harrowingly beautiful exploration of unrequited love and the fallout of single-minded devotion.
In three different incarnations, Eve is given the chance to “get it right” in a familiar struggle between vocation, marriage, and motherhood.
Eve is a devoted mother, a wife, and a painter. Or rather, she’s all three but can only be fully devoted to one at a time. In this three-part novel, we experience three possible paths for Eve; Rosewood weighs each version like a chemist, precisely and intentionally changing the size of three variables in Eve's life: her son, Blue; her husband, Liam; and her best friend, Pari, the sole subject of Eve's portraits. As a mother, Eve is negligent and intellectually unfulfilled. When her son accidentally drowns, she is completely subsumed by his phantom, losing her husband in the process. As an artist, Eve is a portrait of hesitation, unable to act on her desires for anything beyond her work. In the last section, the only one where Eve and Liam’s relationship has any longevity, we know it is at the cost of motherhood and vocation. Across these alternate realities, Rosewood explores the cost of love, the notion that complete devotion to any one thing creates an unfulfilled life. Using visual art and the artistic vocation as a metaphor for writing is a familiar trope; where Rosewood stands out is in her unromantic meditation on the grotesque in beauty. The three parts of the novel act as reincarnations: three opportunities for characters to grow and reform themselves. Anything that remains static here is not immortal but corpselike. Pari's beauty, obsessively recorded in each of Eve's paintings, becomes like the sculpture Eve makes of her dead son—creepy. While the novel sometimes feels overly self-conscious, Rosewood's haunting prose and the moments when the three alternate universes bump up against each other are delightful. Just a shadow exists on the page, but a way to reconcile Eve’s three identities hovers just out of reach, for the reader to create in their own life.
A harrowingly beautiful exploration of unrequited love and the fallout of single-minded devotion.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68283-137-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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