A heartbreaking but deeply humane story about parents and children.
A modern Irish classic, first published in 2010, finally makes its way to America.
At the beginning of this pristine novella, a young, unnamed girl is sent to stay with childless relatives at their farm in County Wexford, Ireland, for the summer. Her parents have temporarily disposed of her due to her mother’s latest pregnancy and the strain of feeding their large family. Despite having been unceremoniously abandoned with relatives she barely knows, Keegan’s narrator quickly warms to Mr. and Mrs. Kinsella and blossoms under their care. While her father views her as little more than a burden and a potential tool—“She’ll ate,” he tells the Kinsellas, “but ye can work her”—and her mother is eager to get rid of her, her foster parents not only bathe, clothe, and feed her, but also provide her with enough care and attention to expand her conception of what family and love can be. Sadly, though, her golden summer cannot last forever. Like all of Keegan’s work, including last year’s Booker Prize–longlisted Small Things Like These, this novella is both concise and gut-wrenching. Her superficially simple prose persuasively conveys a child’s sometimes-innocent but always careful and insightful observations of the world. Keegan suggests that children see and understand more than adults might like to think without turning her narrator into a miniature grown-up. “Walking back along the path and through the fields, holding her hand, I feel I have her balanced,” the narrator reflects, thinking of Mrs. Kinsella. “I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad because I can’t remember a time, and happy, too, because I cannot.” The novella crescendos in a final scene that will inspire many to call their fathers—once they’ve finished weeping.
A heartbreaking but deeply humane story about parents and children.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6014-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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