An interrogation of the nature of truth, virtue, and reality, cloaked as a page-turning novel of escalating crises.
A former NPR personality and his Danish wife have their lives upended by a summer in Copenhagen.
Reuben is canceled. Dismissed unceremoniously from his job on public radio after having been caught in flagrante delicto with his wife during a work Zoom, he’s now a stay-at-home dad in Brooklyn. (“Reuben had become a victim as only a man could, refusing himself everything until his dignity had been returned, intact.”) His wife, Cecilie, has a stellar career of her own as a New York Times reporter, but when she finally has a chance to take maternity leave, she can’t wait to pack up Reuben and their baby, Arne, and head to her mother’s home near Copenhagen. Upon being reunited with her group of friends—all journalists—Cecilie learns that one, her former boyfriend Jonas, has been diagnosed with a serious neurological disorder. It becomes her mission to convince him to undergo a potentially life-saving, but risky, treatment. Meanwhile, Reuben falls under the powerful sway of another, the charismatic Mikkel. Reuben becomes obsessed with the notion that Mikkel represents the opposite of everything ailing the American man: “authentic,” unapologetic, decisive. When Mikkel takes Reuben under his wing, it will have surprisingly far-reaching consequences. With his third novel, Lipstein has created a kind of trilogy of young New York men in ethically dubious circumstances, mostly of their own making. (This time, though, the novel contains a dual point-of-view from both Reuben and Cecilie, broadening the palette.) One of Lipstein’s gifts is his slipperiness—just as the reader feels a character’s foibles are being mocked or even pitied, the target shapeshifts, the moral questions twisting and dissolving. If this all sounds like abstract philosophical fun, don’t worry: Lipstein knows his way around a plot.
An interrogation of the nature of truth, virtue, and reality, cloaked as a page-turning novel of escalating crises.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780374613358
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
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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