An engrossing, soulful story of people working their way toward redemption.
A Jewish family copes with illness, lawsuits, and the spiritual legacy of the Holocaust in Berger’s latest novel in a family saga.
This fourth novel in this series unfolds in 1991 with the Greek American Jewish Covo clan settled in the New York City area and beset with ethical quandaries. Psychiatrist Nicky Covo faces a malpractice lawsuit alleging deliberate neglect of a patient who died by suicide—a charge that Nicky is almost certain is baseless. Meanwhile, his second wife, Helen, doesn’t want to face the fact that her daughter, Sarah, has terminal cancer, and Nicky’s daughter, Kayla, is dealing with schizophrenia, which derailed her career as a concert pianist, while raising her 7-year-old son, Jackie. She starts courting a man in her Hasidic congregation who seems like a straight arrow—until he proposes premarital sex to test their compatibility. Nicky’s son, Max, starts questioning his legal career while pursuing a nasty, thankless case. Nicky, Helen, Kayla, and Jackie also visit Nicky’s sister Kal, who’s now a Greek Orthodox nun known as Sister Theodora at a monastery in Greece, where she and Nicky grew up. Theodora converted after a priest sheltered her from the Nazis and Nicky miraculously survived a grenade explosion during the war. She still wrestles with guilt over her previous, insistent claim that Jackie is the second coming of Jesus, an idea that offended her family. Still, her uncanny warmth and clairvoyance make the Covos turn to her for solace: Helen asks her to pray for Sarah; Kayla seeks help for her composer’s block; Nicky, a professed atheist, confessed infidelity the previous year; and devoutly Jewish Jackie starts seeing visions of the Virgin Mary.
Berger’s yarn presents his characters with moral conundrums large and small, set in the context of deeply held religious traditions. It’s also a rich, subtle study of the varieties of religious devotion, from Talmudic legalism that tempers commandments with practical wisdom to mystical visions that feel rapturous and dangerous and prayerful communion with God. Berger explores all this via complex, flawed characters mired in real-life quagmires. He often writes with a meticulous realism that dissects behavior and motivations with clinical precision, as when Helen attempts to find solace in bourbon: “The surge of alcohol into her throat and esophagus brought about a coughing spell, and a small quantity of bourbon became airborne as droplets in Helen’s kitchen. When the coughing stopped, Helen spilled out the rest of her drink….That’s what grief does to you, she thought. It makes you selfish. It makes you reckless and thoughtless.” However, the prose also takes on a quiet lyricism in moments of plangent reflection: “The times in Kayla’s life when she had most felt prayer encompassing her, although she wouldn’t have called it such at the time, was when she performed. Beethoven, the Appassionata in particular, was nothing but a prayer to Hashem.” The Covos’ struggles are sure to resonate with anyone who’s ever had an uneasy conscience and a hopeful heart. An engrossing, soulful story of people working their way toward redemption.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781685136734
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2025
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
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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