An uneven first outing but brimming with promise.
This darkly comic debut tells of how a father and son try to cope with misfortune.
David Rizzo is almost 60 when his 30-year-old son, Nick, ODs, flatlines, and then is revived. Driving to the hospital makes the father miss an appointment to sell his struggling gun store, which is located in a low-traffic “commercial wasteland” in Phoenix, Arizona. His car is towed because he parked in a space reserved for medical staff. His credit card is declined at the rehab where he planned to leave Nick. Such is life for the hapless Rizzo, whose chief pleasure is TV, especially the ads. But wait! There’s more! Business actually improves at the gun shop after Nick makes an ad offering to donate a portion of every sale to a local rehab center. Then Rizzo sells an assault rifle to a young man who subsequently fires 200 rounds in a local high school. He doesn’t kill or injure anyone, but since he was underage, Rizzo goes to prison. He also largely disappears from the book. Nick shows he’s his father’s son through a string of bad business and personal decisions, such as partnering with a local entrepreneur who mixes poor judgment and fraud and leaving a former junkie pal in charge of the gun store. Sammartino takes clever shots at marketing, philanthropy, business ethics, and gun violence—although it’s risky to exploit school shootings, even in black comedy. It’s also questionable to sideline Rizzo after he’s been the narrative’s focus and most developed character for 100 pages. But in this ode to losers, one could do worse than relying on Nick, whose main traits are inadequacy and remorse. Sammartino does have a knack for edgy writing, and occasionally he pauses to observe the world in well-crafted patches of staccato, propulsive prose.
An uneven first outing but brimming with promise.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781982196745
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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