A sparklingly eccentric novel, historically intelligent and wryly amusing.
In Haas’ historical novel, a German family moves to California in search of peace and freedom as the First World War approaches.
In 1914, Anna Lanz, a violin player, lives in Berlin with her husband Gerhard—he builds telephone switchboards— and two not-quite-teenaged children, Benji and Lilli. War is brewing across Europe, and she lives in a state of emergency, waiting for the world to explode. Gerhard is hopelessly impractical and waits idealistically for communism to deliver them salvation. Anna hears about Sunland, a bohemian community that has retreated into the mountainous countryside of Langenhain, where clothing is optional and electricity is frowned upon. Surprisingly, Gerhard agrees to visit for a couple of days with the family, and they become intoxicated with the simplicity and solace of this place that seems free from global tumult and the crassness of modern life. As Richard Weiss, more or less the leader of Sunland puts it: “Do you know what you do? You have people living in a state of obscene decency. Instead of manufacturing you have singing. Instead of money you have good looks. In place of the army you have conversation under the trees.” In this moving and startlingly fresh novel, the Sunland members—with the Lanz family in tow—decide to decamp for San Bernardino County in California, a land where arable farmland is abundant with the reputation of being the “world capital of being left alone.” However, there is no complete escape from the war—the Sunlanders wrestle with the prejudice and suspicion reserved for enemy aliens, which intensifies as the war begins. Moreover, the sexual libertinism of Sunland is not always emancipating, and threatens the marital bond between Anna and Gerhard. Haas’ writing style is supple and bitingly ironic—there is not a hint of preachy didacticism here, and he vividly captures the wages of world war and the sometimes-quixotic responses to it. This is a mesmerizing novel, delightfully funny and unpretentiously wise.
A sparklingly eccentric novel, historically intelligent and wryly amusing.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988550549
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Beck & Branch Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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