Witty, frothy, and ultimately wise, this sendup of the marriage plot would make Mrs. Gaskell proud.
Sometimes a Victorian-era caper, replete with crinolines and coiffures, carries a shockingly important purpose beneath its skirts.
If Jane Austen and Nora Ephron collaborated, they might produce something close to this new novel by Waldman, in which two 19th century English servants conspire to see their mistress and master wed. Alice Lockey is lady’s maid to Lady Jemima Alderwick. While the imperious Lady Jemima tends to whine about hairstyles and finds two dozen gowns “so few” for a week in London, Alice believes her own position the best to which a farmer’s daughter might aspire. When Alice meets Charlie Wells, valet to Jemima’s suitor Viscount Nigel Wynstowe, she dreams they might marry and live under the same roof, if only Jemima will accept the rather doughty nobleman’s hand. Since Jemima prefers the attentions of a small-time con artist named Thomas Smythe-Roberts, Alice and Charlie scheme to endear the Viscount and the Lady. Things, of course, go awry, necessitating trips between town and country. During one of Alice’s errands in London (its urgency due to her wish to spend time with Charlie), the couple meets Emmeline, an administrator for the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, with its unfortunate acronym of SPEW. After attending a few of the Society’s lectures and meetings, Alice realizes that she and Charlie have markedly different ideas about their future together: “She and Charlie would grow old, content in the lives they had built in their homey rooms in their pleasant village. A good life. A happy life. But not the life she wanted.” Waldman comes up with an ending so interesting and unusual that to say even one word more would be unjust.
Witty, frothy, and ultimately wise, this sendup of the marriage plot would make Mrs. Gaskell proud.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781101875346
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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