A thoughtful and satisfying concluding volume of a trilogy.
Berger’s sequel novel offers an examination of how generational trauma is passed in the continuing story of a psychiatrist and his family members.
Dr. Nicky Covo, a widower, lives in New York City with his partner, Helen Blanco. A Jewish Holocaust survivor, Nicky was separated from his sister as a child after the war was over. His daughter, Kayla, has schizophrenia and lives with her brother, Max, and son, Jackie. Across the Atlantic, Nicky’s sister—a nun named Sister Theodora—lives in a monastery under the guidance of Abbess Fevronia. Sister Theodora dreams and has visions that her grandnephew, Jackie, is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Jackie, meanwhile, is recovering from trauma he experienced when his mother stopped taking her medication and harmed him. Nicky, in an attempt to help the musically inclined boy, takes him to the New Orleans Jazz Fest; however, a chance encounter with Jackie’s father there puts a custody case in motion. Meanwhile, Sister Theodora and Abbess Fevronia leave Greece and head to the United States to try to put the nun’s assumptions about Jackie to rest: “Theodora felt that she had an important role to play in God’s plan. God would not have given her the vision of Jackie as Jesus had He not wanted her to act.” This series entry, following The Flight of the Veil (2020) and The Music Stalker (2021), ably explores convergences and divergences between Judaism and Christianity; the story of biracial Jackie also touches on topics related to race, and the author’s treatment of these subjects is confident and never heavy-handed. The chapters masterfully handle three separate storylines and multiple points of view, which dovetail naturally over the course of the story. The novel’s overarching theme of how trauma is passed down from parents to children is particularly well handled, and it makes this story work well as a stand-alone work as well as part of a series.
A thoughtful and satisfying concluding volume of a trilogy.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131579
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 22, 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
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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