An unusual look at racism through the lens of Colonial America.
This coming-of-age tale charts the troubled early life of a boy from India in 17th-century Virginia.
When his courtesan mother dies from cholera, an 11-year-old who goes by the name Tony soon loses the guidance of her British patron and the easy life on southeastern India’s Coromandel Coast. The patron arranges for Tony to sail to London, but while there, he’s waylaid by child snatchers and shipped off to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1635 on a vessel carrying other kidnapped kids and indentured workers. Looking back from “years later,” Tony narrates his misfortunes with soulful resignation and his scant pleasures with youthful delight. His nemesis is a sadistic, sexually abusive White farm overseer, but the boy soon learns that he faces a more enduring problem. While he sees himself in a racial limbo, neither White nor Black nor “tawny” like the local Indians, his brown skin places him nearer the losing end of the Colonies’ caste system. He escapes farm labor by talking his way into working with a physician, yet he remains essentially an indentured servant and soon comes to realize that no amount of medical knowledge will grant him the same respect as a White man. Charry, who came to the U.S. from India in 1999, writes in an author’s note that Tony is based on “the earliest-known mention” of an East Indian worker in Colonial North America. But this quasi-historical novel is less concerned with period details of speech, clothing, crafts, or furniture than with the human interactions that affect an “in-between and indeterminate” person like Tony—and doubtless his followers of the Indian diaspora. In a charming touch, he sometimes recalls a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream he saw in London and takes comfort in how Titania values an Indian boy.
An unusual look at racism through the lens of Colonial America.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781668004524
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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