Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.
Long-hidden secrets and trauma threaten two women’s plans for their lives.
Pride and Piazza, the duo behind We Are Not Like Them (2021), a thought-provoking and popular-with-book-clubs treatment of race and interracial friendships, advance that conversation with a contemporary story about race and mothering. Cinnamon Haynes, a 34-year-old community college counselor, lives with her (unsuccessful) entrepreneur husband, Jayson. Cinnamon survived for years as a Black child in the foster care system and still deals with its painful legacy. One coping mechanism she employs is to avoid revealing her background to most people, including her best friend, Lucia, and Jayson. When Cinnamon strikes up a casual but genuine friendship with Daisy, a 19-year-old White woman she's taken to meeting every Friday in a local park for lunch, the stakes are raised dramatically in Cinnamon’s game of escaping her past. Daisy, who carries several secrets of her own, upends Cinnamon’s carefully constructed facade when she designs a plan for Cinnamon to “accidentally” find and then raise the baby daughter she's given birth to after a concealed pregnancy (and her flight from the area). Reluctant to subject anyone else to the conditions and experiences she suffered in the care system, Cinnamon struggles to balance her increasing affection for the blue-eyed baby—whom she refers to as Bluebell—against the social and personal factors weighing against her becoming Bluebell’s adoptive mother. Pride and Piazza’s narrative offers myriad opportunities for reflections on interracial adoption, the loss of cultural and racial legacy in those adoptions, and what is truly in the best interest of the child. The slow reveal of Cinnamon’s journey allows for varying points of view to be shared, including those of friends, spouses, mothers-in-laws, and social workers, as well as the motivations of both Cinnamon and Daisy.
Pride and Piazza ask hard questions about race and what it means to be a mother.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781668005507
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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