A powerful and timely addition to Appelfeld's great body of work.
On a visit to the Polish village where his late parents were born and his grandparents perished in the Holocaust, Tel Aviv shop owner Yaakov Fein finds love with a gentile farmer and hate in the form of festering antisemitism.
No physical evidence remains of the Jewish families who lived in tiny Szydowce, but Yaakov, whose coldly distant wife opposes the trip, hopes that merely by being there he will learn things that were kept from him by his parents. They survived the Nazis by hiding in the forest (as did young Appelfeld). Magda, the kindly farmer who takes Yaakov in and quickly becomes the love of his life, provides valuable memories, having worked in his grandparents’ house. His encounters with other villagers are unsettling. They claim they don't know anything about the wartime massacre of Szydowce’s Jews, who were locked inside a synagogue and burned alive. Their hatred of Jews surfaces after Yaakov discovers that after the massacre, tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were broken up and used as cornerstones for the town square. His attempts to acquire the stones, including his grandfather's, are met with derision by the manipulative mayor, who sets an exorbitant price for them and rips Yaakov for turning it down. “There are people for whom money is God,” he says. “They can't be changed. Even God himself can't change them.” Appelfeld (1932-2018), who didn't often make explicit references to the Holocaust in his fiction and uses that word only once here, attains raw emotion with his account of the horrific violence. The book, in which Yaakov’s dreams play an important role, has a fuzzy, dreamlike quality itself, leading to a more detached ending than in masterpieces such as The Age of Wonders (1981) and The Conversion (1992). But this 2005 work, being published in English for the first time, still haunts.
A powerful and timely addition to Appelfeld's great body of work.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780805243611
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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