A timely, well-crafted tale, imbued with cultural and personal sorrow.
A family’s tangled past comes to light.
In her debut novel, Israeli Canadian memoirist and short story writer Tsabari gently unfolds two narratives: one about young Yaqub and Saida, who fall in love in an Israeli camp for Yemeni immigrants in 1950; the other about Zohara Haddad, a graduate student, newly divorced, who returns to Israel from New York in 1995 after her mother, Saida, dies. The teenage Yemeni lovers are ill-fated: Saida is married with a child, and when her husband discovers the relationship, Yaqub is forced to flee. A few months later, Saida suffers an even more devastating loss. Forced to place her tiny son in the camp’s nursery, she cannot find him one day when she goes to breastfeed. Although she’s told that the child became ill and died, Saida, for the rest of her life, nurses the hope of finding the baby, whom she’s certain was put up for adoption. Zohara discovers the complexities of her parents’ lives when she cleans out her mother’s house: Tapes of her mother singing unfamiliar love songs, a mysterious photograph, and stories written in someone else’s hand all reveal long-hidden secrets. Tsabari sets Zohara’s story in the context of the social and political unrest that has long vexed Israel and Palestine. The Oslo Accords have just been signed, inciting ferocious protests. Tensions flare between Ashkenazi Jews and Yemeni Jews, and stereotypes and superstitions abound. “Maybe,” Zohara thinks, “Israeli anger was also a manifestation of helplessness, of grief. This was a nation of migrants, exiles and survivors, people who fled from genocide and persecution only to arrive at this place where wars never end….” With Zohara as a central character, Tsabari examines the effect of loss on a woman struggling to define herself as a Jew, a scholar, and an Israeli.
A timely, well-crafted tale, imbued with cultural and personal sorrow.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780812989007
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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