Ambitious in scope, serious of purpose, yet lacking a distinctness that would have allowed all its facets to shine.
A young woman inherits an apple orchard and sets out to realign her life with the rhythms of the natural world.
Anna, a former painter in her late 20s, has inherited a remote apple orchard upon her grandfather Joe’s death. Joe was a distant figure, yet in the lush, permaculture farm Joe has left her, Anna finds not only traces of her grandfather’s essential warmth, but also a path forward into a “world of immense gentleness” where she can “expand her understanding of a single instant out into infinitude.” In the solitude and constant labor of the orchard, Anna feels she is progressing toward a kind of perfection found in a deliberate and “fundamental rearrangement of the world.” This idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Jan, a peripatetic friend from her old life, and the lurking presences of Gil and Tamara, experienced neighbors who are helpful in running the orchard but also express a proprietary feeling toward her land and the way they think she should be farming it. Jan’s inability to understand the “inhuman anonymity with which [Anna is] living” destabilizes the psychic connection Anna feels with the orchard, yet the real threat to her new life comes when the practical needs of the harvest force Anna to bring more people in to work, reframing the land as a monetized business and changing Anna’s relationship to the beings who inhabit it. Gorgeous, erudite, and ungoverned, the book suffers from some of the same unhappiness as its main character. The demands it makes on the reader to navigate its often overwrought, or simply untranslatable, ethos betrays what seems to be its originating impulse: to resist the call to “decipher…the world” and instead let form and technique “leach waterily into one another, like salt and soil.” A little less—fewer similes, fewer flights of transcendental thought, fewer iterations of the orchard’s inhuman beauty—would have given the reader more to work with when the novel reached its conclusion.
Ambitious in scope, serious of purpose, yet lacking a distinctness that would have allowed all its facets to shine.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798885740500
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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