An intimate and remarkable family saga.
Torres’ debut novel tells interwoven stories of three generations of brilliant, complicated women—and a ghost.
While traveling in South Africa with her boyfriend, Marcella glimpses an unknown but oddly familiar woman through a train window and is suddenly flooded with memories of her grandmothers, Adele and Nana, and other notable women in her life. This opening leads into a story that offers a nuanced exploration of a complicated family history. Marcella’s father came from a wealthy Protestant family, and her Jewish mother’s family owned a deli in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the years, Marcella, her sisters Isabella and Alessandra, her mother, her aunt Joan, and her grandmothers all experience volatile and difficult relationships with their own fathers, boyfriends, and husbands. Glamorous Adele, living alone on an elegant seaside estate, believes that she’s been haunted and protected all her life by the spirit of a nameless woman—an apparition that also appears to other female members of the family on rare occasions. Marcella narrates the women’s intersecting tales in a voice that combines snarky, self-deprecating humor, keen psychological insight, and affectionate tenderness. The episodic work effectively examines the ways in which women are forced to shrink themselves to accommodate men and how they still manage to express their own brilliance, nonetheless. Torres’ writing is vivid, moving, and often funny as it homes in on telling details, as when Marcella’s boyfriend Keith is described as “wearing Dad Nikes without any evidence of shame.” Her characters are well rounded and authentic, and she takes her time to paint a fully realized portrait of a family with unspoken secrets and unshakeable bonds and an emotional landscape in which what is unspoken is at least as powerful as what is. The novel’s nuanced treatment of complex themes, including death, divorce, illness, sexism, racism, and even the supernatural, makes this a very impressive debut, indeed.
An intimate and remarkable family saga.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954805-13-2
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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