Exciting and stirring throughout.
In Schrader’s novel, a housewife leaves her husband to die in the snow in an effort to upend her life.
Macy Miller is a dutiful wife and mother: She raises her two kids, keeps a clean home, and looks after her husband, Chris, when he stumbles home drunk every night. On one such evening, Macy elects to break with routine. Inebriated, Chris falls down outside, and Macy watches silently as his body is buried by the snow. Chris survives, albeit in a hypothermic coma. While her husband lies in the hospital, Macy reflects on her choice to let him die: “She had crossed an invisible line inside herself, and the realization of what she was capable of was as significant as the act itself.” As Schrader’s well-paced story unfolds and Macy’s past indiscretions come to light, it becomes clear that her actions on that night were not truly out of character. There is a “beast” inside of her, one that craves an intense life, but she has instead chosen stability. As a teen, this beast manifested in acts of self-harm and an assault on a boy who is now the detective investigating Chris’ accident. Later, Chris awakens and is spiritually reborn. His resultant commitment to sobriety and God culminates in new careers for him and Macy as Christian influencers. As Macy is thrown back into the mundanity of her life, her secret urges for a different existence threaten to again rise to the surface. Schrader deftly examines the peril of hiding one’s true self and the struggle to maintain the masks we wear in society. His prose is evocative without being overwrought; describing Macy’s beast, he writes, “It lived…In the depths beneath the oak trees. In that half-second of eye contact with the mud-slicked man whose teeth had gleamed in the shadows. Something has been passed to her. Something that had never left since.” This well-crafted novel combines the excitement of a thriller with the insight of character-driven literary fiction.
Exciting and stirring throughout.Pub Date: April 15, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bad People Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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