An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender,...
Frisch offers a debut novel about best friends growing up on an island near Tahiti who experience tragedies connected to local radioactivity.
Teenage friends Ari and Natua’s beautiful South Pacific homeland in French Polynesia was used as a nuclear testing site by the French government from the 1960s to the ’90s. Natua’s single mother, Angela, has serious health issues and is trying to keep the family hotel running so that it remains a viable tourist option. All their lives become more complicated when Ari is diagnosed with myeloma, which may be related to fallout from the nuclear testing years before. Her activist father, Manu, is trying to force France to declassify documents that would support his efforts to have the radioactive waste safely cleaned up. Manu runs into many political obstacles but fights on, although his greatest concern is his daughter’s health. Everyone is haunted by their pasts: Ari and Manu are both racked by grief over Ari’s brother Henri’s death in a plane accident; Natua wants to meet his biological father; and that father and Natua’s mother have secrets that will affect the futures of all the characters. Over the course of this novel, Frisch delivers a braided story of home and family that features complex and evolving but navigable relationships. The story moves through time with ease—Ari and Natua start the story as 14-year-olds and later reach young adulthood, island hopping to find medical care and the answers to family secrets. The major players, who include Angela, are lovingly and authentically realized as the narrative goes on, and Frisch integrates ideas of caretaking—watching out for one’s friends, one’s family, one’s home, and the planet in general—with serious, emotionally resonant life-and-death subject matter.
An ambitious, moving saga that connects the personal and the global, illustrating how a youthful friendship can have tender, lasting effects.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 979-8987742105
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Bombus Books
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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
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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