Love and familial empathy shine through in this quiet, powerful novel.
In the final book of Dzikowski’s Moon Trilogy, a 44-year-old artist leaves New York City to visit a town that shares her name, where a stranger is looking for her.
Ohioan Leon Ziemny knows “things could flip on a nickel,” and in this series entry, things certainly do: Leon’s childhood home back in Langston, Indiana, is on a list of buildings to be demolished. His middle-aged daughter, Willow, unexpectedly shows up in his current hometown of Weeping Willow, Ohio, just after someone else wanders into town asking about her. Leon’s first wife, Noël Trudeau, died giving birth to Willow in this quiet town, which was known as just Willow back then. Tragedy haunts several families there, including the Ziemnys and Trudeaus as well as the Ketchfields, so it’s no wonder that the town was renamed after the weeping willow trees that Leon planted after Noël’s death. Noël’s parents, Jack and Lily Trudeau, had moved to Willow in 1953, not long after the horrific death of Black preacher Raymond Roberts in their former Louisiana town. Over the years, the families experience a stillbirth, a premature death, suicides, and—in 2020—further tragedy after the unexpected appearance of the preacher’s elderly younger brother Booker, who’s trying to solve his own family’s mysteries. Time works differently in small towns, and in the best novels about such places, the prose does, as well: “This is a messy world. We live in an in-between place,” the preacher tells Lily in 1953, as read by Willow in 2020, and all time seems to exist at once. Letters found in secret compartments, medical records stashed in basements, and a buried Bible effectively bring the past’s mysteries to life and complicate the present. Somehow, Dzikowski keeps the narrative moving with the unhurried consistency of a sidewalk stroll to the corner store—one in which, as Lily writes in a letter, “even the cracks on the sidewalk seem to sing.”
Love and familial empathy shine through in this quiet, powerful novel.Pub Date: July 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780984030583
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wiara Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
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
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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