A sincere collection of stories chronicling love and loss.
This set of interconnected stories explores the lives of Indigenous characters—all of whom are tortured in some way by romantic grief or confusion—in a range of settings across Canada.
We encounter a mother who confides to her son about her youthful passion for another girl, a parolee who struggles to orient his need for companionship as a free man, and several artist figures who agonize over their creative and erotic frustrations. The impact of past and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples forms a prominent thematic backdrop here, and the dysfunction plaguing individual characters’ lives is overtly linked to systemic forms of trauma. These stories are earnestly told, and the author’s concern for drawing attention to marginalized forms of suffering is clear. However, the narrative’s didactic impulse—paired with the adolescent sentimentality that is this collection’s guiding sensibility—produces rather hollow effects that tend to undermine the plausibility of the individuals it presents to us. The author favors direct summations of his characters’ lives and motivations, which often manage to be at once maudlin, portentous, and fuzzy: “He wonders what the world will be without her in it. The truth: it will be nothing and it will be everything.” A reliance on academic jargon sometimes takes the place of any genuine psychological probing, as in this description of a man eavesdropping on his neighbors’ lovemaking: “Their animal sounds remind me that the I is a trick of the light and that the plural is dense and unbearable.” Though the collection aims to confront large themes—most obviously, the impact of colonialism and intergenerational trauma on Indigenous sexuality—it seems, at last, not to illuminate the subjects it would represent, but to evade them.
A sincere collection of stories chronicling love and loss.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781324075943
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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